😎 A year of Swag for Developers
Exactly one year ago, swag-for-dev blew up on Product Hunt! It was quite a roller-coaster experience for me.
I had created the repo a day before to scratch my own itch as nothing piques my interest more than developer swag! The dev community turned out to be super-supportive, sharing many of their own experiences on reddit and hackernews. People were more into dev swag than I had expected!
I was completely blown away by the response, making it to the most trending repo and developer on GitHub! 🤩
Timeline
Feb 18, 2018 - Created swag-for-dev repository
Feb 19, 2018 - Featured on Product Hunt with 500+ upvotes
May 17, 2018 - First newsletter went out!
Oct 1, 2018 - Website launched
Oct 7, 2018 - Crossed 3000 stars on GitHub and featured on Changelog Weekly
Dec 3, 2018 - Created a Telegram Community (150+ members)
Traffic
| Month | Unique Visitors | Sessions | Pageviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct '18 | 5368 | 8555 | 12371 |
| Nov '18 | 2000 | 3241 | 4390 |
| Dec '18 | 1787 | 2826 | 3839 |
| Jan '19 | 1603 | 2535 | 3611 |
A unique visitor is an individual person who visits the site. Regardless of how many times they return, unique visitors are only counted once per month.
A session is when someone visits the site, browses around, and leaves for at least 30 minutes. One visitor can have multiple sessions in a day.
A pageview represents a single page being loaded or refreshed. One visitor can contribute multiple pageviews in a day or even in a session.
CPM vs CPC
CPM stands for Cost-Per-Mille (Mille is Latin for “thousand”). The price is based on 1,000 impressions. It's a low-risk model as the payout is quite deterministic.
I tried CodeFund first for advertising as it's a very promising platform. Unfortunately, there weren't many Advertisers at that time so visitors would see a default ad most of the times. It had a $2 CPM. (P.S. It recently underwent a complete revamp so I'm excited to retry it soon!)
CPC stands for Cost-Per-Click, and is a performance-based metric. This means the Publisher only gets paid when (and if) a user clicks on an ad, irrespective of the number of impressions.
I had seen ads via Carbon on a lot of dev sites (like JSFiddle, Dribbble, etc.) so I decided to give it a try. They are quite relevant to the dev community and so was the right fit. I have seen around $0.65 per click. However, it's very unpredictable as sometimes weeks would go by without a single click!
Overall, the ad revenue right now is just enough to cover the operating cost so things are good! I'd like to dip my feet into spending on a little bit of advertising if it increases in future. 🤞
Services Used
- Netlify - for deployment (The folks at Netlify were kind enough to grant us a generous team plan! ❤️)
- Hello Bar - for displaying header notifications (e.g. We displayed a tip in October which filtered #hacktoberfest opportunities.)
- Beamer - for sending out announcements / changelog on the website
- Appzi - for getting feedback from users
- BrowserStack - for testing (Hit me up if you'd like to lead this integration. 🙋♂️)
Fragments
- 🎉 We just crossed 1000 email subscribers. You can subscribe here if you haven't already.
- 🤝 ~100 Pull Requests have been merged!
- 💯 For quality control, we get it verified by our awesome community!
- 🤑 There are currently 15 approved opportunities on devSwag's website (excluding ~20 expired opportunities).
- ⌚ The Telegram community was started as we failed to get newsletter sponsors to justify the time investment.
- 🏋️♂️ Collaborating is hard. Taking decisions and bringing consensus is even harder. I learnt it while taking a lead on launching the website on Oct 1 (the start of Hacktoberfest). Mihir and Zac designed the initial version of the website.
- 🤫 A couple of Feature Requests are funded on IssueHunt (you might need to refresh the page once).
- 🙌 Major kudos to Zadkiel and Vikas for keeping the project alive. I can't thank you guys enough!
I'm eagerly waiting for this year's hacktoberfest; we're aiming to make things a lot more streamlined. Stay tuned for more updates!
P.S. I was exposed as "That Swag Guy!" in a Slack community I joined. 🤪
Until We Meet Again...
🖖 swap