Ask HN: My site's popular. How would YOU monetise it?

Virtual goods. Go super edgy, forget flowers.gif and hugs.png: vices sell, introduce liquor, hookers and hard drugs. Maybe even go deep on the cultural references, even be a little harsh and xenophobic. Virtual gifts have a general positive connotation because they're usually given to <i>friends</i>, on facebook and other closed social networks. Twittering is a place for adversaries, a perfect play ground for irony and everything anti.<p>As a super premium: allow people to upload their own text and graphics for a dollar, and attach <i>that</i> to the tweet.<p><pre><code> @squarejaw bought *victim* a pair of nads @ironical sends you a touching violin solo on a miniature DVD @citygirl sends you another pair of pink polo shirts to wear over all your others </code></pre> etc.

I don't think you'd be able to get people to pay for premium features...what would they be anyways? I do have 1 idea: Sponsored tweet placement. Companies are probably willing to pay extra money for certain tweets to get special placement.<p>Besides that you should get retweets/replies working, i wanted to RT a few things and got put off by the coming soon box.

Why not a simple "Buy this on a t-shirt" link next to popular tweets? Given how easy it is to print stuff on shirts now, I'm sure someone has an API for resellers looking to put words on a t shirt.

Hey guys, the server bill's getting pretty big now. I'd like to start setting up some paid accounts pretty soon. Apart from crawling people more often, can you see any creative ways to give extra benefits to paid members? Any suggestions appreciated. :-)

nice work, it's fun to get some of the best stuff out there that doesn't seem to be made up like tfln or fml<p>1) Add tipjoy functionality, encouraging users to tip the best/funniest/helpful tweets.<p>2) charge referral fee to users who you scrape. Each new follower they get from favstar.fm costs $0.10 (seems like many of the people you are featuring are self-employed or creative types who would probably like more followers)<p>3) sponsored favoriters... allow brands/users who want their profile pic to show up as if they had favorited a tweet. pay per impression or click basis (they could get creative with the profile pics to grab attention)<p>4) promotion of top favorites across the web. build plug and play modules that people can add to their own sites, my yahoo, igoogle, their facebook page, etc. (or maybe just an RSS feed). Anyone can post it to their own site for entertainment value, but the only tweets that are eligible for the module are ones from paid accounts. Trouble is, the best/funniest twitter users probably wont want to pay for that distribution, they don't need it.

I found a small problem on your site (for me at least). For reference, I am running Firefox 3.5 on Gentoo.<p>On a page like this, <a href="http://favstar.fm/users/asshuku" rel="nofollow">http://favstar.fm/users/asshuku</a>, the Japanese kanji is being rendered like Chinese kanji. It's still readable, but it's just a little off-putting. I'm not native Japanese (I can read it, though), but the best example I can give of what this feels like for a Japanese person is that all of the text on the page has been highlighted and underlined. Readable, but annoying.<p>I was playing around with it in Firebug, and it looks like a simple(?) fix would be to change the line: &#60;html lang="en" xmlns="<a href="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml</a> xml:lang="en"&#62; to: &#60;html xmlns="<a href="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml</a> xml:lang="en"&#62; or: &#60;html lang="ja" xmlns="<a href="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml</a> xml:lang="ja"&#62;<p>You might also be interested in seeing Google's solution (<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=google.co.jp" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=google.co.jp</a>), Slashdot's solution (<a href="http://www.slashdot.jp/" rel="nofollow">http://www.slashdot.jp/</a>), or Wikipedia's solution (<a href="http://www.wikipedia.ja/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wikipedia.ja/</a>).

What's your definition of popular? I can't find any stats on your site that show any reasonable levels of traffic that would allow it to be either ad or freemium supported.

Maybe deck network (<a href="http://decknetwork.net/" rel="nofollow">http://decknetwork.net/</a>) or fusion ads (<a href="http://fusionads.net/" rel="nofollow">http://fusionads.net/</a>)?

Might I suggest <a href="http://FeaturedUsers.com" rel="nofollow">http://FeaturedUsers.com</a>? It's a Twitter application ad network for users who want to promote their Twitter account. It integrates into your site w/ 1 line of Javascript. Full disclosure, it's my project. :)

Adsense would be a good place to start

I really didnt see why some of the tweets were being favorited. Based on their content, i'd agree with vulpes above - it'd be pretty difficult to get ppl to pay $$. Sponsored placement sounds like a good idea.<p>Another suggestion, although not monetization related - provide a widget of say the top favorited / top favorited users - that bloggers could embed on their blog - increases distribution.

I would say register with a site like Quantcast.com so you can publicly quantify popularity of your site. This gives bloggers and businesses easy access to your numbers. People like to talk with popular sites.<p>You might want to check out Chris Anderson's book on Free: the Future of a Radical Price as a good source for brainstorming business models.

After tweets have proved themselves, remove them from the site and hawk them to comedians. You'd just need one motivated buyer willing to spend a lot. Or better yet, use them yourself like William Shatner used Sarah Palin (giving back some to the original tweeters for an extra bonus).

I would love to suggest a good business model, but I am afraid I will have to tell you that even twitter is not able to monetize its huge traffic.<p>Forget monetization for now. Try to get acquired by somebody who think they can make use of your traffic.

The layout is bit odd to show the content; I prefer a site like fav.tweets: <a href="http://www.sixteenseven.com/fav.tweets" rel="nofollow">http://www.sixteenseven.com/fav.tweets</a>

Sell it on to a 'greater fool'?:-)

use your traffic numbers as a proof of popularity and sell the idea to Twitter, then let them worry about it.