Last week I posted here at 700K page views. Honest update: most of that wasn't the site I want to build. What happened On Oct 13 we hit 81,923 visits in a day. 64,334 of them were on one page: a browser port of GTA V that streamed Rockstar's game files. I took it down the next day. Not worth the legal risk. Google went from 38,000 visitors a day to about 730. I also caught a bot farm that was ~7% of "visitors" (one page each, 6 seconds, same time zone and language every time) and filtered it out. Where it's at now ~4,000 real visitors a day, and 53% of them press Play on a game 34,600 visitors and 41,000 Play clicks this week Revenue: $307 from 24 sales (it was $158 at the last post), $100 of it this week Hosting is about $40 a month Revenue went up while traffic fell because it never came from ads. Indie devs pay to put their game in front of players ($10 for 40 guaranteed plays), and they kept coming after the GTA traffic left. What surprised me A second sponsored card in "More like this" doubled paid plays (0.29 → 0.59 per 100 game page views) and cost about 2% of organic plays. Shipped. Puzzle games need about 1.7x the card views to get a play compared with other genres. Same price, later start date. A countdown to the next drop of new games (twice a day) lifted returning visitors from 34.6% to 36.5%. Small, but p < 0.001. ChatGPT referrals went from 11 a day to ~95 in ten days. They land on pages like "Call of Duty in your browser": lists of original games for people searching a franchise. AI outreach agents now email us asking to list their clients' games, because they can't get past the email code on the submit form. Next: creator launches (a dev debuts a new game in one of our drops; the first one is Sunday) and Product Hunt on Tuesday. It's foundplay.io if you want to poke at it. Happy to answer anything about the numbers.   submitted by   /u/TheRealXmo [link]   [comments]