Two Stories of Passive Income Excess
It was a bit surreal to see two of my HN comments in a blog post on the front page of HN.<p>Since people are interested, here's another tale of my year running affiliate campaigns on Facebook.<p>By the time I got into the game the competition was already heating up. I spent most of my efforts scaling my dating site campaigns internationally because global traffic was a far more fertile field, with less competition and cheaper clicks.<p>After I had maxed out all the nations of the English speaking world, I started running campaigns in France (and I unwittingly and unintentionally advertised hard core porn on Facebook in France for at least a month because of the geographic based redirect of the dating site I was advertising, with a US based IP you saw a tame site, with a French IP explicit hardcore porn)<p>My greatest success however was in expanding my operation to Latin America.<p>In the industry the concept of banner blindness is crucial to understand. Click through rates go down over time, both for individual ads and for entire nations. Because a site like Facebook wants to maximize its CPM, higher click through rates are the way to get cheaper clicks and profit.<p>I took my profitable ads in English and ran them through Google translate into Spanish. It was something simple like "Meet Hot Girls".<p>The hardest part was finding a dating site that accepted South American traffic. Credit cards and e-commerce have a ways to go in the global South, and therefore the traffic is of much lower value because it converts much less.<p>I found a tame version of Adult Friend Finder without any nudity on it's landing page. At the time Friend Finder Networks stated that they accepted traffic from almost all of the South American countries.<p>The first day I ran my campaigns in Columbia & Venezuela the response was incredible. Just astounding.<p>In an English speaking country you would be lucky to get three people out of a thousand to click on one of your ads. That first day in Columbia I was getting ten people out of a thousand to click and the clicks just cost one penny each!<p>I was converting at a rate that Friend Finder was paying me 14 cents per click and in that first day I made over $5000 with very little ad spend.<p>A small ad spend was important because I had to pay FB daily but was only paid out every two weeks and I was just out of college with very little credit.<p>I could have made so much more in those days with an American Express Plum card and unlimited credit.<p>As the South American ad campaigns went on the click through rates trended closer to the rates of their Western counterparts. It is for this reason I think I might have been the first person to run dating ads on Facebook in Columbia.