$1500/Month from a 3-Year-Old Directory Site

Hive Index is a directory of online communities.

The founder (Fed) recently tweeted…

Got the first site sponsor for @thehiveindex! 

New revenue streams are always fun 😁

The sponsor he is referring to is a site-wide sponsor. They pay $500/month for a banner link at the top of every page of the site (example).

Fed has been building Hive Index on and off since 2020 along with consulting as a software engineer.

He has been busy curating and adding communities to the site, tweeting back in June…

Just passed 2000 communities on @thehiveindex!

Not stopping yet, this site will be THE spot to discover online communities for ANY topic

Programmatic SEO has been key to growing traffic 📈

But Fed had been working on the site for almost 3 years without really monetizing it.

In April he introduced a paid membership for community owners which allows them to have more control and traffic to their listings.

Looking at the site, there seem to be 50+ paid listings at $197/year, which was $10/month in earlier days. Either way, that’s $500-800/month.

Fed also offers community promotion, which costs $99/month.

So three ways he’s started monetizing…

• Site sponsorship
• Gold Membership (for community owners)
• Community promotion

Overall, I expect the site is now earning about $1500/month 🤑

Fed tweeted back in March…

Fun fact: @thehiveindex was a “warm-up” project

I built it just to get in the habit of taking ideas to completion

Without much intention to keep growing it, I launched after 2 weeks

Now it’s 2 years later and it’s stronger than ever, opening up new doors every day!

Funny how these kinds of projects can bear fruit if you stick with them long enough.