I've have a few massive traffic surges from Reddit in the past, as much as a few 100k visitors, and have been wondering the same. Usually it amounts to just a handful of opt ins, fewer than I get from about 1k of organic traffic.

My impression is that people are most just interested in taking a peek before returning to reddit, so unlikely there is much you can do. I think the real value from scoring well on these sites comes not from the traffic, but from journalists and bloggers who monitor reddit for things to write about. I've found a high scoring link on reddit often leads to several secondary backlinks, which bring more engaged visitors.

Sounds like we have a similar experience. I noticed HN and ProductHunt resulted in more press than Reddit, even though they drove far less traffic to the site.

But maybe success on Reddit / HN / PH could be used as social proof when pitching journalists?

Oh, right, forgot to mention that part: the secondary links, e.g. from newsletters, end up with much higher opt-in rates.

In the past I have included a "contact us for API access" email address, even if what I was posting was just an MVP. This helps me gauge interest in a potential SaaS, and has resulted in beta testers for a few of my projects.

If the sites are on a root domain, then you can put ADWords on the site and get paid, but not much. Typically a thousand impressions is a dollar. Depending on how long the URL stays on the frontpage, you could be looking at 20,000 - 50,000 impressions which roughly translates as USD 20-50.

You get paid even more when ADs are clicked on.

To be honest this is a rather dated way to monetize a site now with the sudden surge of visitors using ADBlockers, and you might want to look into other ways to monetize, such as

- Affiliate links

- Premium/paywalled articles / content

- Donation buttons, using PayPal / Bitcoin/Litecoin

Also keep in mind that since getting frontpage on HN is so rare, then it can't be a sustainable source of income

Thanks. That's the impression I got, too: I looked at the numbers and decided running on ads wouldn't be worth it until I was getting far more steady traffic.

Do you know how the visitors:dollars ratio for less intrusive methods -- such as affiliate links or donation buttons -- compares to the ratio for display ads (~1000:1)?

Consider that most people coming from these sources are just looking for a quick read; they don't have a problem they're trying to solve (referral/search traffic), they just want to be entertained.

So I've gotten same number of subscribers from endorsement tweet that was probably seen by a few hundred people as I've gotten from thousands of visitors from HN.

It's important to have a good call-to-action for subscribing to the mailing list that is tied to your page content, rather than generic or unrelated. Gotten 3x improvement from that. But it's still a low sign up rate.

Do you charge for a product? Why don't you run ads? Do you have affiliate links?

I'm not sure what can be suggested if you don't have some revenue generating conversion goals. Trying to get mailing list signups, social follows and social shares can't hurt though.

1. I do charge for products — just not the more interesting open-source ones that tend to do well on HN & Reddit. (Also, my income from client web design & writing is probably loosely affected by the success of my blogposts and open-source side projects.)

2. I don’t run ads (at the moment) for both practical and philosophical reasons. (Practical: most of my sites don’t get enough steady traffic to generate much revenue. Philosophical: ads are annoying and I block them, targeted ads invade privacy, and ads are designed to get people to buy things that they (probably) don’t need.

3. I’ve considered affiliate links in that past, but haven’t used them yet: like ads, the benefits don’t yet seem to outweigh the costs. Aside from Amazon, which seems to be the most popular, what affiliate networks would you recommend?

Fair enough, but I don't understand what the big deal is. I'd try ads, affiliate links and monetising existing free projects myself. If you're going to make your interesting projects free, avoid ads and avoid affiliate links you're not leaving yourself many options. Would you have any income at all if you extended these ideas to your client work?

What are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals?