Youthumb
A simple web tool to find thumbnails of youtube videos
So I wanted to learn how to setup a blogging system using next.js and thought I could use Youthumb as testing place for this as the website has always lacked content for SEO and advertisers.
I decided to go with having the blog post in markdown files and then parsing them using gray-matter and markdown-it to get HTML files that I could display using next.js. The implementation is rather basic and it mostly just displays the content of the markdown file with some extra metadata stuff such as title and date the blog post was written. Using the metadata was also very easy so I also added a link to the newest blog post on the frontpage.
This works great for me since I am very familiar with writing markdown and don't have any troubles writing and committing it to git to publish it on the website blog.
After writing two testing articles I figured it would be nice to have a call to action or some way to navigate the reader to feature of the website at the end of the article. So I added a small arrow with a "Try it" caption and a inline form for finding the youtube thumbnail. I don't have any metrics yet to back up if this really is effective, but I like the look of it
You can preview the blogs here: https://youthumb.net/blog
Last September I was revamping this website and adding analytics, https://pirsch.io, for the first time. After seeing how much traffic the website was getting I decided to try to monetize it. Since it just a simple tool/utility website and I decided to try to add ads. Since the website does not contain much contextual content I could not get it approved to google adsense. I found an ad-service called Adsterra. It worked great and I have now gotten some data from running ads and traffic analytics on the website since January.
After 3 months with average if 6.6k visitors and over 40k pageviews it has generated $14 of revenue from ads. With how horrible the ads are performing I will remove the ads.
After a couple of years of this project being in hibernation just hosted for free I decided to redesign the website. I began by actually adding some analytics to the website and noticing it got over 30k pageviews a month was quite surprising for me, but it also motivated me to do this redesign.
Nothing was wrong with the site but it didn't have any branding and had just a single input form. I wanted it to give the user a better feeling that they where using my site and not any other website. Also I liked the refreshed look and it makes it easier for me to expand on the website.
This was a project I did back when I was learning to write web projects in Angular. It was a simple tool that solved a problem I sometimes had when i found a nice Youtube thumbnail I wanted to use as desktop background. I didn't expect anyone to be interested in it and therefor just left the project the next few years without any metrics or tracking to know if people was using it.
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