2024-02-05

Making Money from a Stats Website

ARAM Zone is a stats website for League of Legends. It has two main features: Either see which items/runes are more likely to make you win a game when playing a specific champion or look at your own past performance and games.

The only monetization it has right now is a single "anchor" ad at the bottom of the screen. It made $80 last month, $50 the month before and ~$25 the few previous ones.

Obviously not a lot of money, and certainly not something I can live off of, but it's a promising start. Most of the users use an ad blocker though, my competitors all have annoying popups that ask you to turn it off, which I might do at some point or just ask for money for not showing ads. It's hard to ask for a paid subscription or one-off purchase because my competitors are ads-based and show the info for free, so even if I have a few extra bells and whistles it's probably hard to justify for most people. Not sure if that's the right way to think about it though.

Most of the traffic comes from google by searching "aram zone" or reddit. I only did marketing on reddit, so all users come at least indirectly from there. Sometimes posting on reddit gives me a big bump of new users, and some of those become recurring users.

I tried SEO, and the keywords I care about are supposed to have really low difficulty but I'm not ranking well for any of them. There's not a lot of text in the website because the nature of the data is more visual-based than text-based, I think that might be affecting things. Either way there's a lot of traffic for some of these keywords so that's a good place to focus to get more users.

I've also focused on the ARAM game mode of League of Legends so far, which is kind of niche and more relaxed than the normal competitive experience, so people might care less about a stats website to improve their chances of winning. I'm building a version of the website for ranked play which is almost ready and targets a much larger market, but I think it might ironically be harder to promote, at least with the approach I've been following so far.

I've been posting mostly on r/ARAM which doesn't have strong rules against self-promotion and I don't do it too frequently, but the main sub /r/leagueoflegends has much stricter rules against it. I probably need to find other smaller/medium sized ones where I can post or come up with some creative solution to post in the main one.

The name is also an issue, it's called "ARAM Zone", if it's not only about ARAM anymore it probably doesn't make much sense. It already has a bit of a brand though, and is well-known in a small circle at least, not sure how much that's worth or if I just pull the bandaid and migrate to a new domain name.