Sound of Text
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I finally took the plunge and allowed ads on Sound of Text after almost 10 years without them. I have actually tried several times to get ads, but Adsense (and others) would turn me down.
A few months ago, in October, Publift reached out to me and I decided to move forward. I was always curious what type of ad revenue that Sound of Text could generate.
Turns out, it's over $3k per month!
After running Sound of Text, for free on the side for almost 3 years, it received over 100,000 unique users in February 2017, according to Google Analytics.
I think what is most interesting about this growth is that I spent very little effort on it. I only ever "launched" Sound of Text a single time, to Hacker News in 2014. All the growth after that was completely organic.
I think growth is pretty easy when your product is free 😁 Either way, it is fun to see Sound of Text grow.
8 Comments
Congrats! Is your audience mostly on mobile? Or on MacOS? Because many browsers nowadays block ads automatically. Or do you handle ad-blockers in any way?
Hi. Audience is primarily mobile. I don't handle ad-blockers at all.
Congrats!!!
Congrats on successfully implementing ads!
Congrats on successfully implementing ads!
How were you able to sustain Sound of Text for nearly a decade without generating any revenue?
Thank you!
Well, the average cost of upkeep was something like $5/month for a server, so I didn't really care about revenue. It was not originally my intention to make money from product. I built it while I was still in college. It was more of a resume piece than anything. It just so happened to get more and more popular over the years.
Congrats!! How many monthly visitors do you have?
Thank you! I'm averaging between 2 and 3 million monthly pageviews. Around 1 million unique visitors.