both of these require very large audiences to make money, the amazon affiliate program pays very poorly and people hate & block ads. Not saying it's impossible but the days of slapping a few ads and affiliate links on your website and expecting to make decent revenue are long gone. Especially if you want to offer a good UX
Actually they aren't long gone at all. Go look at Empire Flippers, Flippa, etc. I build, buy, and operate affiliate and display advertising websites. Lots of sites can make $30 per 1000 visitors just on ads depending on the niche. Some affiliate sites make over $700 per 1000 visitors. Again it depends a lot on the niche.
Also the majority of people do not block ads. This also depends on the niche though. Gaming and tech niches are usually low RPM unless you get targeted affiliate traffic (like you show up on Google for "Best Gaming Laptops of 2021")
would you consider a book reviews website a profitable niche? seems like it'd be a gamble in terms of effort vs reward given that most books are pretty inexpensive
People looking for books online likely have more disposable income than the average population. So I would say ad revenue will probably look pretty good but this is just a guess. Sometimes this can be surprising for different niches. For example, you might not think recipe websites make much money but in fact they often make $30 per 1000 visitors (on ads alone) due to their audience profile. I got turned down offering $140k for a recipe website a few months ago. They were making around $3k per month.
As far as affiliate revenue, they are very likely to be making a purchase soon if they are looking at book reviews so if you can get them to click your Amazon affiliate link there will be fairly high conversion. The revenue per purchase probably is quite low due to the price and margins on a physical book (although I wonder what it looks like for Kindle books) but with enough traffic you can absolutely make it work. I can think of some interesting ways to get a lot of traffic with Pinterest as well in this niche.
This is a numbers game. Keep your costs low and your time involvement low and even if it is only making $2k/month that is good enough because you can have several sites at the same time.
Btw as far as needing a ton of traffic to make money well sometimes that is true to an extent. Recently I was looking at a website that was the most popular user-created website for a specific mobile game. It is generating $6k/month despite having the lowest RPM I've seen so far (only making around $2 per 1000 visitors). Despite this the hosting cost was only $50/mo and I bet I could get that down to $15/month with even better performance.
Side note - you get paid commissions on everything people buy for a certain time after clicking your affiliate link. People buy tons of stuff on Amazon so you'll get lots of revenue for non-book things too.
If you want more info on this type of business model go look at these site (I am not affiliated with them at all):
'...so you'll get lots of revenue for non-book things too.'
If you refer via a the books category and then someone buys from some other random category you get a much lower percentage. This has been a recent move and makes such tactics very unprofitable - for good reason too.
It's not really a "tactic" it's just a side effect of people buying everything on Amazon. You say tactic like it is some slimey technique. You are referring people to Amazon so you get paid for it.
I see a lot of sites grow to thousands in monthly revenue fairly quickly and sell quickly for a minimum of 40x monthly multiple. There are tons of resources and tools out there to build sites that will generate a lot of organic traffic.
It takes a lot of work but if you have the resources practically all of it can be outsourced. What I do is learn as much as I can about each role that is needed, then I hire virtual assistants and train them to do that role. That helps keep costs down since you aren't hiring an "expert".
I'm growing a couple sites right now that I haven't written a single word for or taken a single photograph because I have some awesome writers and a photographer. I've also never posted a single article to Wordpress because, you guessed it, I have an awesome VA that I trained to do that for me. I even have a content manager (the highest paid role) who manages the writers and tells them pretty specifically what to write.
They get paid immediately. It requires capital to run this business. There is always a risk I will lose everything I invested into it. Running this business requires several different roles.
a thing a I tried, and ran out of steam with, was writing SQL queries in my client side code but statically extracting them with babel, so you have some code like this:
const users = await sql.query`select * from users`;
console.log(users);
and the query itself stays on the server so you don't have to deal with the problem of unbounded complexity / DoS.
This is the same approach Facebook uses for GraphQL. The only reason I gave up with this idea is that getting the developer experience right is hard work and it does introduce some very tight coupling!
Legacy codebases are hard to remove because it's difficult but once you turn every SQL call into an HTTP call... the remaining part is the logic which can be rewritten into something more modern.
I saw something earlier today that said (inelegantly paraphrasing)
"developers read articles as if they themselves were a compiler, immediately stopping as soon as they reach a sentence they disagree with and then throwing a syntax error"
It's a pattern of behavior that affects a lot of online communities from what I've seen, not just HN, but it's particularly concerning when I see that kind of stance here.
There are a number of writers who I disagree with on an ideological level but whose writings and podcasts I'll read/listen to because of the insight these people can provide - even if often I don't agree with their conclusions. I think it's important to be able to consume opinions that don't match your own and be able to hold them in your head without throwing a fit.
I agree, one very concerning trend I've seen on Twitter (and it's probably seeping into other online spaces too) is that merely following or engaging in discussion with someone whose ideas are controversial can be grounds for a blocking or pile-on.
Another quote I saw today: "90% of the internet is just people imagining a guy, tricking themselves into thinking he exists, and then getting really mad at him."
It's purely a Western (USA) view that this is a bad thing (although not even European leaders change that often). I'd love to see Putin rule for many more years because I don't see any sane alternative. Why would I want him to be replaced with somebody else, especially inept and low-brow Navalny?..
Frankly, we don't have a choice. I favour Putin, but mostly because there's no alternative. There's not a single opposition leader that is trustworthy and competent.
But it's not like Putin is a bad leader. Maybe the lack of choice is due to his actions, but he's doing lots of good things for Russia. For me, clear sign of this is how he's hated by the western media.
Bad Russian leaders are loved by western media (e.g. Gorbachev, Yeltsin) and good ones are hated.
It's a little strange that in all of Russia one can't find an alternative, for decades. One might think that when an alternative shows it might get poisoned and jailed.
it's not as simple as that - poisonings, beatings, imprisonment etc have a chilling effect. We have no idea which leaders would step forward if it weren't for the effects of intimidation.
That is to say, someone smart enough to become a political force to be reckoned with is probably smart enough to realise that they will be faced with some terrible consequences for doing so. Their chances of success are extremely small and the chances of punishment is high. The smartest move is not to participate, and so this filters out all but the most principled or naive and foolhardy.
Sorry, I cannot spend my vote on such a vaguely described person - I live in this country and its my future. My list starts with representation. This person must represent interests of a big group of people wich includes me. This person must represent interests of businesses I find valueable for my country. This person must have a prioritized list of problems to fix with the corresponinding steps he think must be taken. Otherwise, as you correctly stated it is not worth participating.
So, sorry, neither Nemtsov nor Khodorkovsky doesn't pass, BTW are there someone else?
People like you are the reason you don't have any choise, World is increasing turning to dictators, same thing is being propogated in India in form of Modi, anyone else is being ridiculed.
I don't know anything about India politics and I don't think it's equal to Russian politics. Anyway, I can't compare. But I don't think I'm the reason for Modi or people like me. It's a different situation. E.g. Modi is nationalist and Putin isn't. Modi is pushing one predominant religion and Putin isn't. Etc.
No, I don't see how it is possible. First of all, West and East use different metrics and different words for describing political views. E.g. "left" in US and "left" in Russia are very different things (also, "left" and "right" are almost not used in Russia).
I happen to remember USSR collapse, then the awful years of Yeltsin, when everything went to hell: economy was dead, crime rate went through the roof - there were shootings every day on the streets, suicide rate went through the roof, population started to decline because people didn't want to have children (or didn't have means to raise children), millions were starving to death. And I remember how this started to change almost the next day after the first election of Putin. No more street shootings and businessmen cars explosions. Corruption started to wither (and continues to this day). Not only old buildings stopped to deteriorate, but new buildings, roads and bridges started to appear everywhere.
In short, just about every metric you can measure started to improve under Putin's rule. Except maybe some "freedom of speech" which is almost unimportant to me. I remember that "freedom of speech" was used to calumniate Russian past and present in 90s, I don't remember a single good thing caused by "freedom of speech" in 90s. Bunch of freaks were allowed to speak on TV and other media, what they said caused only strong negative emotions in everyone. It was obvious that it had nothing to do with making our life better.
the perception from the west is that corruption in Russia didn't go away but was simply hoisted up to the level of government. How do you feel about the level of wealth that Putin and his associates have accumulated during his reign?
It is interesting that you talk about different metrics and different words meaning different things to Russians compared to those in the west. If we can't use "left" and "right" as descriptors, and you don't place much emphasis on "freedom of speech", what _are_ the values that you think are important? (I suspect, from what you say, even "freedom of speech" means something different to you than it does to me)
It wasn't just a corruption. I cannot even choose a word to describe these terrible business schemes when all enterprise's income in a foregn currency were syphoned out of the country, workers payments were constantly delayed and the enterprise asked for donation from the state at the same time.
Putin stopped that.
As for left or right I would label Putin as right inclined centrist.
During Yeltsin times corruption was equally high both on street level and government level. But West didn't care, on the opposite - West praised Yeltsin and even openly meddled in our election to elect Yeltsin for the second term. Despite him being extremely corrupt and using his position to enrich his family and friends.
Now, West suddenly become very concerned with Putin's alleged wealth (nobody had seen it) - why? Why Putin's wealth is more important than Yeltsin wealth? Why current level of corruption which is measly compared to level of corruption during Yeltsin times had become so extremely important to the west? Why it didn't bother anyone before?
What is important to me: being able to live normal life: have a job, have access to medicine and education for me and my family, having enough food on my table to not starve. Less important but nice to have is enough income to travel somewhere for holiday at 1-2 times a year. To have friends and family. To not have war in my country (which is US currently actively pushing as well - they hope to force war between Europe/Ukraine and Russia because that will be very beneficial for US economy and US being separated by the ocean will not experience the devastating effects of the war on its own territory).
I do not believe that democracy exists anywhere or even actually possible. I do not need some kind of "free speech" whatever that means. I like to blog, but I seriously doubt my blog would cause any problem in any society. I'm definitely aware that blogging in the US is more likely to create problems than in Russia.
In Russia nobody cares if you're rude or politically incorrect or you have contradicting political views. Many of my friends do not support Putin unlike me - that doesn't ruin our friendship. Whatever I write on my blog will never put me in trouble in Russia, even if I'll write "I hate Putin, he's a crook" - nobody cares despite what you may read in western media. In Russia I can write or say: "BLM" or "All lives matter" and I won't have any problem at my job or with the police or with anyone. In the US there's only one approved view that you can openly support, otherwise you're destined to have problems, e.g. you can be fired from your job and become homeless if you don't agree with your latest election results or don't support some SJW movement or you support it but not in an approved way.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. It does seem that "better than Yeltsin" is a running theme in this discussion, so in turn I wonder what "better than Putin" would mean to you?
With regards to tensions around the border with Russia and Europe, Putin is firmly seen as the aggressor from here, especially after the annexation of Crimea. To us it seems that Russia is testing the water, with the full knowledge that essentially everyone in Europe wants to avoid an outright war.
You say that you can blog freely without consequence in Russia, but I wonder what the effects of publicly disclosing e.g. homosexuality would be? The impression I have is that it would be analogous to admitting to racism in the US or Europe.
I do appreciate being able to have a reasonable conversation with someone who literally sees the world from a different angle to myself!
With regards to tensions around the border with Russia and Europe, Putin is firmly seen as the aggressor from here, especially after the annexation of Crimea. To us it seems that Russia is testing the water, with the full knowledge that essentially everyone in Europe wants to avoid an outright war.
I assure nobody wants a war here. From here it's seen as USA aggressively trying to push Ukraine to start something stupid like trying to take Crimea back by force. Ukraine is not a sovereign country, it's under external control and they have a very little choice. Their economy is unviable, and I guess US gives them a hard choice: either you go to war with Russia or the flow of credit from the West that allows you to feed your people will stop.
We don't need Ukraine at all. It's useless for us, it's useless for Europe. If we'd captured the Ukraine (and I'm sure that would be easy), we'd have to feed the big population that can't feed themselves and about 50% of that population also hates us to guts. Everybody understands it, including Putin. Why waste resources feeding big ungrateful population if you can offload this problem to Europe?
USSR tried to feed too many hungry mouths: Georgia, Asian republics, Baltic Republics. USSR built infrastructure: schools, hospitals, industry in those countries. They were prosperous during Soviet times because Georgia for example, consumed roughly 10 times or more money its economy generated. The difference was covered by RSFSR (Russia). Only to hear after USSR collapse that we were oppressors. Nobody is going to make this mistake again. Nobody wants to take back Georgia or Tajikistan or Estonia or Lithuania. Let them care about themselves, we better spend our resources to make our life better rather than trying to buy loyalty.
So, I highly doubt Putin have any desire to start a war. It's not beneficial to him or to our country at all. It would be highly beneficial for the US, though.
I'm surprised to hear this description of Ukraine. I'll agree that their economy is not particularly strong (although it is recovering), but it has historically been an agricultural powerhouse and is still one of the world's largest grain exporters. Famine in Ukraine in the last century was a direct result of the collectivisation policy of the USSR, not an intrinsic inability to feed their own population.
The message I'll take from our exchange here is that what you and I know to be true is a result of the culture and media that we've been exposed to throughout our lives, and that objective truth is hard to determine, even for well educated people. Less well educated and informed people stand little chance of discovering the true-truth in this environment.
Ukraine economy is not strong and not recovering. One of indirect measures of economy health is energy production and consumption. Both metrics are declining in Ukraine for many years, especially after 2014 coup.
All the industry was destroyed, especially after the coup of 2014. Agriculture remains, but EU sets a tiny quote for Ukrainian exports. So maybe Ukraine could produce and sell more agricultural products, but they can't sell them because EU quotes are exhausted usually within the first month of the year.
Also, agriculture isn't so simple. It requires huge amounts of hydrocarbons for fueling agricultural equipment (tractors, harvesters, etc consume huge amounts of diesel for example). You also need fertilizers and other chemicals. Ukraine has to import all that.
Also, Ukraine is hostile to Russia so we don't want to import anything from them and law explicitly forbids many ukrainian imports. But EU also has its own industry and its own agriculture and they do not need one more competitor on its market. For example, after 2014 sanctions, when Russia stopped importing many articles of food from EU, many agricultural companies of EU started to experience difficulties. E.g. meat producers in Czech Republic. EU needs to give work to its own citizens, why would they open the market for cheap competing products from Ukraine? So that more EU producers go bankrupt? Not going to happen.
You say that you can blog freely without consequence in Russia, but I wonder what the effects of publicly disclosing e.g. homosexuality would be? The impression I have is that it would be analogous to admitting to racism in the US or Europe.
I guess nothing will happen. It's not like homosexuality is persecuted in Russia. I've seen several times people openly admitting their homosexuality in public with no consequences. It's explicitly prohibited to "promote" homosexuality, whatever that means. Though I've never seen or heard anyone being prosecuted by this law.
> Frankly, we don't have a choice. I favour Putin, but mostly because there's no alternative. There's not a single opposition leader that is trustworthy and competent.
Maybe because every alternative that pops up gets assassinated or jailed by Kremlin.
If it was a democracy maybe more viable alternatives would be seen.
So, I don't see any evidence. I see only accusations. Most of them don't make even slightest effort to consider other versions. This makes it very clear that the initial intent is not to figure what is going on, who are influental players, what interests they pursue and what conflicting points exist. Just blame Putin - people buy it.
a) Not everyone - a lot of people oppose Putin. https://echo.msk.ru, https://novayagazeta.ru Most content on these sites devoted to critisizing Putin and current regime. These people do this for years.
b) Not everyone from your list opposed Putin, for instnace Khlebnikov mostly concentrated on Beresovsky.
2. Correct. We don't have any official evidence. This means that the only thing we can do is to analyze what is available. The links you provided don't help much in this endevour.
In science, you don't need to explain how/why something happens, only reproduce and prove THAT something happens.
We know that people die or are jailed. We can definitely see patterns that group those people together. Everything points to a single explanation, but regardless if that is proved or not, the effects are black on white.
I don't have to understand/prove weak forces or gravity to state that 100 of 100 apples dropped fall to the ground.
In science we create theories which come form hypotheses. Theories need to be proved. Facts may support, oppose, prove or disprove a hypothesis, this is not at all black or white. Facts are black or white regardles of sience.
Black and white facts are the person murdered, crime commited and some other person guilty. The hypothesis is who this other person is.
The fact that the person murdered is not the most dangerous for the person suspected support the hypothesis that this has been done to discredit him. (but doesn't prove or disprove the hypothesis).
The fact that nobody has been prosecuted supports the hypothesis that the suspect is guilty.
No, it was great, but BNC / Coax ethernet was awful and horrible and an absolute nightmare to debug. I probably still have a drawer full of terminators somewhere
Yes. Good ones will have a time-domain reflectometer (TDR) that will tell you were the break or sharp bend in the cable is in addition to the standard is this cable terminated correctly test.
They will also be able to do basic connectivity tests to make sure things above the physical layer (eg: is there DHCP?) are operating correctly so you don't also need to swap to a laptop to fully troubleshoot a network drop.
I used to be a big fan of Derren Brown when I was younger, and I do still like a lot of his work, but he readily admits to deceiving the audience, and the deception includes the explanations he gives for his techniques.
The video you linked to was part of a longer show (The System) which gives an explanation for how this trick was done - he says they kept filming take after take, for 9hrs, until they finally got ten heads in a row.
I think that kind of brute force approach would have been excessively boring to him, and it's much more likely that he switched to a gimmicked coin to get the ten heads in a row, then filmed a few shots of throwing tails for the "explanation".
He wrote Tricks of the Mind and that was a great book. One piece that has stuck with me for ~15 years now is the 20 word series that I can recite forward or backward after spending 5 minutes visualizing them in a "linked list". For example, telephone - sausage - monkey. Vividly imagine dialing a payphone with a sausage. Next up, sausage monkey. Vividly, using all your senses imagine a monkey flinging sausages to the point of absurdity where he's swimming through sausages.
You just created a mental linked list that you can traverse from either direction, and that you'll remember for as long as you want to. Push it to the extremes, build up your method of loci to arbitrary lengths, build your memory palaces and become Hannibal Lecter.
I've done the exact same trick in my mind to remember a sequence -- the "linked list" linking A to B, B to C, etc. It just seemed natural to me, I didn't read it anywhere. If you have the "head pointer", you're probably golden.
When I told a colleague about this years ago, he said that my approach seemed so much more complicated and/or difficult than his approach (IIRC it's called the Memory Palace?) of building a castle/cathedral / museum in your mind, and as you walk through it, you see a banana on the left, and then a monkey a little further down the hall, then a trombone on the right, etc. For me, that technique simply doesn't work, as much as I try.
The book covers both techniques (though not in great detail), Memory Palaces are another term for Method of Loci[0] - in my experience it is actually much better and faster, but requires habitually revisiting rooms in order to remind yourself of their contents (this is as quick as mentally walking through a door into a room and glancing around it from left to right). This is easy and fast but it's also easy to forget to do it and then the contents do start to fade. I use the layout of the first house I owned as my "palace", so it's a real place but no longer somewhere I actually go to in real life which helps avoid confusion.
The linked list idea works well and arguably lasts longer, but it's also much more time consuming to "set up" (for me at least), and suffers from O(N) time complexity just like a real linked list (i wonder if it would be possible to construct a mental skip-list!) and if I forget a single association then the whole remainder of the list is forgotten.
I can build my grocery list in my memory high school and neighborhood. The skip list could be built as an acronym built out of first letters taken from named areas.
So that all the employees and major stakeholders don't dump stock on day 1 and tank the price, often permanently affecting the company's perception in the eyes of investors
I don't think it's solely the "price-tanking", it ties them to the company for a while.
i.e. If I was an investor looking to buy, I'd be a bit worried if the dev team would all be made instant millionaires on the day I bought in, with no incentive aside from salary to carry on working. You might find you'd just bought shares in an empty office.
Also, from the user[0] that posted the original Spectator article:
> Automation tends not to take five minutes, edit people's comments to remove publicly available information on public figures(in this case a passing one sentence mention that did not even mention reddit or admins), make typos on that edit, re-edit them again later to fix the typos and then permanently suspend posters with still no reply on their appeal after almost a day.
The difference is that in the 80s the few people that believed this nonsense were unable to instantly find hundreds or thousands or millions of equally deluded people to reinforce and amplify their beliefs and subsequently amplify the harm they can cause.
There was a lot of that silly content in 1980s and 1990s BBS's, as well as on Usenet and the early Web. People could definitely find an audience for it. What we didn't have was "social" media and its pervasive matching of online with IRL identity and social ties.
So when deluded people read something outlandish online, they're now left free to assume that some halfway-trustworthy real-world entity must be endorsing those claims. There's no expectation of critical thinking or skeptical debate about what we see online because real-world norms are very different, and it all gets conflated as "what's mainstream".
This predates tome's law by 3 years.