The Greatest Books

"A curated ranking site aggregating the greatest books of all time from multiple best-of lists, dominating SEO for book-related searches with 250k daily page visits."
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thegreatestbooks.org
Maker: wtf242
$2,000/mo (AdSense + Buy Me a Coffee paid memberships); couple hundred per month from Amazon affiliate referrals

Marketing Channels

Primary

SEO / Organic Search

Ranks #1 for anything related to best/greatest books; built over 16 years of content and domain authority

Ongoing

AdSense Display Ads

Primary monetization channel contributing the bulk of the ~$2k/mo revenue

Secondary

Amazon Affiliate Program

Generates a couple hundred dollars per month through product API-linked purchase modals

Secondary

Buy Me a Coffee Memberships

Paid membership feature for supporters

Growth Levers

  • Integrate additional bookstore affiliates (bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble) to diversify revenue beyond Amazon
  • Expand paid membership tiers with exclusive features like personalized reading lists or reading challenges
  • Leverage Gen AI to scale content generation for genres, descriptions, and recommendations
  • Explore premium sponsorship deals from publishers given the massive 250k daily traffic
  • Add social/community features to increase engagement and time-on-site
  • Consider a book recommendation API or data licensing for third-party apps

First Customer Strategy

Built the site in 2008 as a passion project aggregating book ranking lists. Traffic grew organically over years through strong SEO positioning. No paid advertising was used; the site's comprehensive content naturally attracted search traffic.

Pricing Insight

Monetization relies on AdSense and a donation-style membership via Buy Me a Coffee. Amazon affiliate earnings are modest despite massive traffic, suggesting the book niche has low affiliate conversion rates. The creator is actively looking for better monetization strategies.

New Market Opportunities

  • Regional book price comparison Building a regional price comparison website for various regional online bookstores, combining curated lists with price comparison as the main USP
  • Multiple bookstore integrations Suggested expanding beyond Amazon to include other online bookstores for a fairer and more comprehensive purchasing experience

Key Takeaways

  • • Long-term SEO investment (16 years) can create a durable moat that is extremely hard for competitors to replicate
  • • Even with 250k daily page visits, monetization remains a challenge — traffic alone does not guarantee strong revenue
  • • A labor-of-love side project can sustain modest income for over a decade if it fills a genuine information need
  • • Amazon affiliate API has severe rate-limiting and TOS constraints that make it hard to keep data fresh at scale
  • • Gen AI can be a force multiplier for content-heavy sites, replacing manual scraping and data entry

Sentiment Analysis

3 Pos / 1 Neu

Notable Quotes

"oh wow, ive actually come across this organically before. good job on seo! — zyx_db"
"Your website is quite inspiring to me and have given me more ideas to explore. — vidyesh"
"I noticed your purchase modal only shows Amazon pricing... I would look into the pricing display guidelines for affiliates. — vidyesh"

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