I built a free audiobook search engine a couple of months back to scratch my own itch. It has been one of my most successful side projects to date. I got around 9k unique visitors in the span of a month after I got to the front page of HN.
Yet now I don't know how to make it profitable. This is something I am interested in building. I simply don't see the potential in affiliate links.
Check the month of February: https://cloud.umami.is/share/V1zn2LVYcBKhQzT7/booksearch.party
It seems like before you think about monetization, you should think about how you can generate the amount of traffic you had in February repeatably. February had 6k visitors, but March had 350, and August had only 240. It's going to be pretty hard to generate any revenue from a website that links to free books with only 8 visitors per day.
The traffic was from the one time hn submission. Now you have to find other traffic sources then use affiliates non-amazon since they closed your account.
> I simply don't see the potential in affiliate links.
What makes you not see that potential here? Seems like the obvious answer, at least if this is aimed at being a nice small profitable side project.
... Perhaps I am just not getting enough traffic yet for it to work. I had signed up for Amazon affiliates but they closed my account due to lack to sales.
add a buy me a coffee or patreon link? some users will support a valuable adfree resource especially if you explain hosting costs