That would be this viral website: istheshipstillstuck.com
Tom Neill is the creator and his write-up of the whole story is a fun read.
He shares that the site was seeing NYT-level traffic for a few days, and he ended up rick-rolling ~250,000 people and getting followed by Sarah Jessica Parker on Twitter.
Most relevant to this newsletter though were his monetization experiments 🤑
The obvious way to monetize a site like that is with display ads. A while back I reported that the viral website howmuchtoiletpaper.com generated ~$25K from display ads in about a month.
But Tom didn’t want to go that route. Instead he tried selling his site as an NFT, which didn’t go very well and only netted him about $60 profit 🙁
Especially for artists looking for a way to finally make money from their art on the internet (I am 100% not putting myself in this category), [the NFT approach] seems very pay-to-play with very low likelihood of success.
He had a little more success with Amazon affiliate links, earning $279 in commissions in 3 days.
However…
Considering that in those 3 days the website had 2.7 million page views, I think it’s fair to say you’re not going to make your fortune from affiliate marketing links to books.
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