Simple as Solitaire?
There are some great comments in this Hacker News post. I really like what the founder of a Solitaire site said:
"It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to
make it take off. I run a solitaire website called
https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me
earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money
from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I
decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That
gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed
and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning
$10k+ a month ."
SimilarWeb says online-solitaire.com gets around 342K visitors a month and is making $10,000 a month from ads. And if you take a look at the #1 Google result for Solitaire (https://solitaired.com/), it gets around 7.3 million monthly visitors and has a similar layout and ad format. If the ads convert as well, solitaired.com could be making over $200,000 a month on ads. Pretty crazy that a simple game optimized for SEO could be making this much.
This makes me think, what other opportunities are out there that could be as simple as Solitaire and ads? You would probably think none exist but then comes Wordle :)
To keep up with my latest projects, follow me on Twitter and My Blog
This reminds me of a podcast I was listening to one day. I can't remember which episode but I think it was the My First Million podcast.
They were talking about how chess.com is a crazy good business. The key takeaways from memory where:
It's not easy finding one of these niche's but it is useful to think through why idea's like these work very well.
Great points! There are most likely other opportunities for less-known games, and these game sites are often cheap to host due to them being client-side. Online-solitaire.com is a great example that you don't necessarily have to be first to be successful.
In the case of Wordle, Josh created his own game, which I think would be more difficult but possible.
I see the potential for a zoom based rockpaperscissors.com app ....maybe?
Thinking along the same lines I made a "52 Pickup" card game for iOS and Android. It didn't end well...
lol
Haha I like it!
It looks like https://onlinesolitaire.com/ is for sale. Any takers?
Need to google first; how to code solitaire in javascript.
Haha exactly I would bet there is a open source project you could deploy. The challenge would be SEO and getting the site out there so it ranks on Google.
Damn, they just got another visitor!
I'd probably think these would be trademarked or sth.
Just checked to see sudoku.com gets 21M visits 😵
Haha yes, whoever owns domains like that are doing well.
I actually don't see the ads on https://solitaired.com/ or online-solitaire.com. Where are they? Also, what tool are you using to measure website traffic and income?
Do you happen to have AdBlocker installed? They should show on the right side after you start a game. They appear to be delayed on purpose. The tool I use is SimilarWeb: https://www.similarweb.com/website/online-solitaire.com/#overview
Thanks. How much do you pay for similarweb?
I just use their extension and its free: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/similarweb-traffic-rank-w/hoklmmgfnpapgjgcpechhaamimifchmp
It also looks like https://www.solitr.com/ is getting over 13 million visits 🤯