I think PG recently mentioned it gets about 60k visitors a day. How well do you think it could be monetized, based on its audience/traffic?
To personalize this a bit, show a simple survey link on the main nav bar that lets users select the types of services they are intereted in. This would then be used to populate a sidebar with dinky ads or other promotions from startups/events.
Here's another one: Have events/conferences sponsor specific threads in HN...Whichever comment receives the most points get a discount or free pass. Once again, affiliate fees on other users signing up for the event kicks back to HN.
And another: create an automated newsletter that sends you a roundup of the days highest voted stories (with topic personlization if you want [ie, only send me Ask HN or 'seeking feedback' type stories]). Sell a few ads in the sidebar to startups on a budget.
If HN is averaging 60k uniques/day, that newsletter could grow pretty quickly. Sell of small banners at a decent CPM and it should make some money. And then of course layer on a taxonomy binding ad server that shows ads relevant to the topic(s) that are displayed in the newsletter based on the users preferences.
Oh wait, it does that already.
So, the startup pays some amount, lets say, $500 for the feedback service. HN guarantees that they will receive 100 pieces of feedback using this tool (which of course would be using node.js, closure, haskel, [insert any trending technology here]). Once the 100 pieces of feedback are received, the 'sponsored link' gets removed and another goes in its place. The startup could also request feedback only from users with certain karma levels (which would cost more money).
HN shows a maximum of 1 sponsored review link at the top of the site, or mixed in somewhere, at a time. I dont think it would be too tough to get 100 feedback notes in a single day (with 60k users that love checking out new startups).
Let's say only one is shown each day, thats $15,000 per month in revenue for that service. That'll buy a lot of ramen.
HN _does_ serve a business purpose and I think it provides Y Combinator with -great- ROI : )
Would Reddit be considered more successful if it was a leaner organization? They say in that post that revenues aren't great, but I wonder if that has more to do with the size/nature of the reddit operation.
If it isn't, then my questions is: are they just not doing a good job of monetizing, or is it just very difficult to monetize that kind of site?
The first is not viable the second is already 'built in' by discussing and recommending various services and products on HN