Disclaimer: The author is an ex-colleague of mine.

Congratulations, Tommy, even though I think you had bigger ambitions of this project initially.

I am curious what your lessons learned are. Correct if I am wrong, but I would say that initially your niche was gift certificates for businesses, because it would be much better to monetize than personal ones. Now you are also doing personal gift certificates. Is this because actually business owners also don't want to pay for gift certificates or is that market just too hard to address?

Would you do it all again (doesn't sound like it from this post)? If you would do a project like this again, how would you go about choosing your niche this time?

Congrats on the income. It's nothing to scoff at.

But what that means is someone else is able to monetize your traffic better than you. Someone is willing to pay 10 cents (or whatever) for your visitor and presumably they make more than 10 cents from that person to make it worthwhile.

So you need to reduce your ad income by increasing your own conversion rate. A/B testing. Find out what terms people who come to your site are searching. Find out what terms you are ranking well in Google for.

High ad revenue means lost opportunity IMHO.

Congratulations. Good job, I wouldn't say no to a few hundred a month with no effort. ☺

Have a look at some of the stuff patio11 is doing for SEO & content creation. Might be helpful for you.

Interesting. I think getting few hundred bucks per month from a single passive income project is pretty good. I have quite a few of these and only a small portion of them exceed the hundred bucks mark.

I see just one basic problem with your project: you are horizontal, not vertical. Seeing that you are able to do that well in horizontal market, I think if you focus on a vertical you may do much better.

Oh yes, and ads are pretty good revenue stream. I have a site that makes more from ads on a couple of care-free pages than from selling paid software that I put a lot of efforts on (to support customers, to release new versions, to market, etc). Ad/affiliate income can be the easiest and the most passive you can imagine (although it doesn't bring the same personal satisfaction as earning from something good that you have built and marketed yourself).

Congratulations. A related question, and something to open up to others here in the thread, what is the current state of ad networks for low-to-medium volume sites?

I am still mostly using adsense, and haven't had a chance to checkout other options. Are there any other networks worth investigating or implementing or is adsense still the gold standard?

That's a phenomenal foundation considering how short it's been since you started putting ads on. Seriously, continue tweaking the site for a year or two in your spare time and it could do really well. You're already doing the content-creation stuff, so ramp that up 1000x and you're sorted.

One thought - maybe integrate with Facebook somehow to get gift certs marketed for birthdays. "Bob's having a birthday, click here to create them a personalised gift cert."

Congrats, Tommy.

If you don't mind me asking, what CPM do you get from the ads? Which are the ones that work the most, the horizontal visual banner on top, the textual ones in the right, or the squared image in the bottom?

I'm quite surprised that you managed to have such high number for such a small niche. That's great!

Nice to see a bootstrapper getting some love.

Congrats, hope it keeps gaining steam while you get to keep tweaking it.

Numbers are quite good, but I wondered: is this official income on which you pay taxes? How do you declare this income? How much taxes do you pay? And, if applicable, is this still worth it after you pay taxes?

Even though it will be very country specific, I'm very interested in your experience.

can you add your traffic details to the post?

Very nice and solid base to build on! You mentioned your income, but what is the cost structure (both monetary and timewise)?

Tommy nice article man! And you're on top of hackernews. Why dont you create an app to send gift cards with? Apps are hot, and its quite easier to rise to the top i think....

However i might be biased :-)

Way to go!

Not bad money for ads. That surprised me.

Now I realize why Internet are full of stupid sites full of Ads. They´re money collect only. Start build a site that you proud of and you will never aloud shit ads pollute your creation.