{"articleprompt": "Write a blog post about this discussion: \n\n  SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/I've been running it for over 10 years now, it's a database of Steam games, their updates, price history, charts, and a lot more.In the early days we took monetary donations but stopped a few years in. It costs less than 100$ a month to run. Cloudflare reports 552.2M requests in the past 30 days, and 6.09M unique visitors. Even assuming a _very_ low $0.01/session, he'd be making $60k/mo.More realistically, if he decided to do this right, and sell direct ads using something like Kevel, with \"promoted\" game slots or something on the homepage and search, he could do $10-$20CPM direct since it's a large and well known site with high purchase intent.Let's say a conservative 4 impressions per page and 3 pages per session.(12 imps per session * 6m sessions)/1000 * $10CPM is $720k / moThis is a _very_ achievable number, quickly, for a site that is this close to purchase intent.I don't understand.  Even putting a single adsense ad at a $1 CPM would net him close to $20k/mo. This might be one of the least monetized sites I've seen at this scale.Respect. You run SteamDB? Thanks for making this! I've used it for all those 10 years whenever I'm getting back into gaming and want to see what the popular games are! The player count charts are a really awesome feature. Thanks for keeping it running all these years. Avid user for years, so cool to see you on the social web! Thanks for your work! I'm annoyed for you at all these people trying to tell you what to do with your project, after you've been doing it successfully for 10 years and they have not. Y'all really think this person hasn't thought about monetizing? Take it easy startup-stans! Wow, you don't make any money on SteamDB? It seems like the sort of thing that should be able to make a lot of money. Even very minimal ads would probably bring in hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars per year, and if you hate the idea of ads it seems like you could probably sell a premium subscription for some of the info you have that would be useful for devs, like imdb pro or crunchbase pro or something. I completely respect the owner of SteamDB for not doing this... I'm not a fan of ad networks as it stands.Although, affiliate links to games might be an idea (assuming Steam has such a thing). At least for the purchase if someone is interested in buying. Most people who do things \"just because\", don't monetize because either it isn't possible or it isn't worth the effort. For a site with as much traffic as GP's, it's probably worth it. Regardless, anyone turning down that much revenue out of principle deserves a lot of credit. Well as xPaw already stated he does not seem to interested in money. I would guess:Give a Steam Award to xPawA Steam Award gives the creator of this site Steam points!Is the best we can do to support his work! I just wanted\nto point there is a /donate. Not sure why it need to be cold hard cash to count. I run Plain Text Sports (https://plaintextsports.com/).I got sick of waiting for ESPN to load so I made a site with the goal of providing immediate access to what people actually care about: sports scores.It's pretty fully featured at this point, supporting the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, Premier League and Champions League, college basketball and college football, WNBA, NWSL, and the World Cup. And for a lot of leagues it has full schedules and standings as well.It actually was really popular in South Africa during the World Cup when a \"super-app\" that points users to sites that don't use a lot of data linked to it.The site is served off of S3 (which is cheap), but there's a job running on an AWS server that's fetching the data for all the games and republishing pages to S3. It's using Ruby and is making a lot of network requests, so it's definitely not super efficient. I need a least a couple virtual CPUs, so it ends up costing ~$60 a month. I could definitely reduce that number, but the trouble just isn't worth it to me right now.I don't want to make money on it. It's been difficult enough to get people to use it; getting people to pay for it would be even hard. At this point I feel like I've gotten everything I've wanted from the project. (An eye-opening experience into the marketing world; a website that I use every day.)I try to limit how much I work on it now to mostly just maintenance work. I'd rather work on other stuff. If I started making money that'd just be a number to obsess over, and, honestly, it's never going to make enough money to replace my salary as a software engineer. Geoquest: https://geoquest.wout.space/It's a geography game focussed on learning all countries in the world.I've had it online for about a year now. It's completely opensource [1]. I only accept donations through buymeacoffee and I've had 2 so far :)[1] https://github.com/woutdp/geoquest Radiant: https://getradiant.app/Premise: Takes your Spotify and turns it into a personalised FM-style radio station, complete with a snarky, AI-powered radio presenter called Rad.Rad'll quip, read you the news and weather on the hour, announce what you've just heard and what's coming next, gives you biographical info for bands you might not be too familiar with but most importantly; Rad helps you discover new music while playing all the songs you know and love, in a smart, contextual way.Availability: iOS, Android.Price: $0Cost to me: like 40-50 bucks a month.Why do it? I use it daily and so do many others. Great for house parties, offices, long car journeys or just your daily pilgrimage to the supermarket. Unsolicited feedback: If this were also offered as a web-based application I'd probably use it (sitting at my desk all day I don't want to use my mobile device for music). Maybe sell rotating ads or sponsorships (on screen but not in the audio stream, please!) to make some $.Very cool. That's exactly what is coming next for it! A fully-fledged web app. It's actually built using web tech so it's an easy port. Just need to rebuild some of the native bits for web (ohh I might get to use wasm!) but once that's done it should be good to go. Planning on pushing out in the next 2 weeks.And yeah while I don't need to run ads on it at the moment, if the right sponsor wanted to work with me I'd be exceptionally happy to do so. Doesn't Spotify have terms around not making money on any apps that use their API? From https://developer.spotify.com/policy/#iv-streaming-and-comme...> Except for the limited commercial uses for Non-Streaming SDAs (set out below) commercial uses are not permitted for SDAs.Their guidelines are super strict about using any music or artwork in specific ways. For instance, I'm pretty certain you need to display a Spotify logo any time you play music from Spotify, which I don't see on the player. And the player has rounded corners on the artwork.Some excerpts from https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/design-a...> To comply with our licensing agreements, you must always attribute content from Spotify with the logo.> Artwork must be kept in its original form. Don\u2019t animate or distort it in any way. This includes applying overlays and blurring.I'm not a lawyer so I'm sorry if I'm reading these incorrectly. I tried making an app using the Spotify API at one point and had it running but it got shot down a couple times for not displaying the Spotify icon. Good on you if your app is all set. I was always worried I was going to face the Spotify legal team with mine and gave up on it.I only mention these because I do love the radio! Great mix of genres so far! Radiant launched with a paid subscription model (like a dollar a month) Spotify shut it down, took away our API creds and left us in the lurch. Had to set it up again, with the subscription removed. That hurt because we had a good number of paying customers at that point.But we moved to be compliant with their guidelines after that and I carried it on as a labour of love.Now I'm actively looking at moving away from Spotify and on to my own data set and APIs that can match what Spotify has. I've built something like it before using the Cover Art Archive for the artwork, Acoustic/MusicBrainz for the metadata and custom logic built atop so I know it's possible.Once I've done that I can start looking for sponsors.There is always the possibility that if the userbase really scales up, Spotify would grant me a commercial license and allow me to commoditise the platform but I don't need that to happen really. It was a native iOS app originally but now it's pure web (straight Svelte SPA, no UI framework) with native plugins.I did it because I don't have the time to maintain for 3 platforms in parallel without one falling behind and I'm not a fan of React native personally. I spent a good chunk of time testing with much older hardware as a target to make sure performance wouldn't be a noticeable distraction for users and I'm happy with how it turned out :) I've got plans to build my own \"open music API\" that'll make whatever service you use just an adaptor that Rad can tap into. At the moment Radiant is very embedded in Spotify's API ecosystem due to a few key features none of the other services has.Longer term thing sadly as this is very much my side deal but it'll get there.Probably make that new API and dataset OSS as I want other devs to build cool stuff without being at the mercy of the streaming services. It was 100.3 KJKK Jack FM which I\u2019m realizing was only in the DFW area. I figured it was syndicatedHere\u2019s a link to what I\u2019m guessing is their site:\nhttps://jack.fm/listen-to-jack-fm/Here\u2019s a YouTube video which is either a recording or a fan-made version. Either way the quip by Jack after the first song (~3:37) nails the tone for the robo dj\u2019s persona:\nhttps://youtu.be/ewDE2rrRbH8 Short-form podcasts are being looked at as sort of a syndicated content. Like there'd be a list of interesting shows like 'The Daily', 'Business Wars Daily' etc that you could subscribe to and have injected into the stream when appropriate!Obviously, I'd expand this with more full-fledged shows if people liked the format. You could even configure it with \"I listen to my podcasts in the morning / after noon / when I'm driving\" etc in settings and Rad would factor that in when choosing when to play em. This is super cool, but the first thing I wanted to do was cast it to the Chromecast plugged into my hi-fi. It seems casting isn't available yet - do you have plans to add it? It would make this a total winner for just playing music in the background. Trying it now and it seems really nice! I wish you had a desktop/web version, and it would be my daily background radio while I work all day. Spotify's Discover Weekly playlists are nice enough, but they barely carry me through the first 1-2 days, and then it gets pretty repetitive.It would also work really well as an Alexa skill, especially with Rad's commentary.What did you write the apps in? Yep, the idea is that the stream of music it plays is both time appropriate and always relatively fresh. You can tune its selection algo too with the thumbs up or down (long pressing on either for more fine controls).Web is due out in the next 2 weeks. Alexa skill has been on the roadmap forever as I've always seen smart speakers as like the place it makes the most sense.The apps are Svelte based with capacitor (planning on switching to Tauri when that gets proper mobile support) and some custom plugins for the native stuff. It was a native iOS app but got a full rewrite to support Android and iOS with the web planned as a fast follow. Very cool! Joined your Discord server. Even if you don't want to monetize it right now, you should set up a Patreon or something like that, and at least let people chip in on your server costs.It would be a very cool community-supported smart radio service :) The app has a built-in link to 'Buy me a coffee' (which actually does cover my coffee expenses along with some of the hosting costs!)I'm quite keen to get a bigger community of people contributing ideas and maybe give me the push to move away from Spotify.Eventually, swathes of the service could go open source too if the community wanted it.Thanks for joining the discord! Interesting! I've never actually thought about that! Very clever!If it was launched from the alarm it could start the show with \"Gooood morning, looks like it's going to be <insert weather> and <insert some info about traffic on your usual route>, now let's get to the reason we're both here; great tunes.\" or something. Also having something I'm passionate about gives me a lot of purpose. I've obviously up-skilled tremendously building (and then rebuilding it for cross-platform) but above all else, it's a lot of fun to build and it's something I personally wanted to see in the world and enjoy using! The major advancements in text-to-speech we've since in the last year have me planning on revamping Rad's voice (maybe basing it on Tom Sellek...who knows) but the fact we've come this far has really opened a world of opportunities for audio-first experiences. I know it's a bit of a laundry list. Everything there is required to use the Spotify API the way I needed to. Playlist read/write so it can add songs you like to the 'Liked on Radiant on Spotify', Profile to set your locale when making requests and for setting your profile picture if you have one etc etc.I'll look at paring it back in future if I can! I love the idea, and I instantly downloaded the app. After a peppy welcome message from the robot, it doesn't actually play any songs. Just crashes constantly :(I can send you any debug info if you like. But no pressure, it's free as far as I can see and I don't want you to worry just because it doesn't work for me.Great idea anyhow!\n\n", "imageprompt": "photo to accompany a blog post titled: \n\nCreating Amazing Projects Out of Passion: The SteamDB, GeoQuest and Radiant Stories", "sourceurl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34547265", "title": "Creating Amazing Projects Out of Passion: The SteamDB, GeoQuest and Radiant Stories"}