Real-revenue cases

How I Built And Monetized A Website Side Project Ranking TV Shows -

Real demand

A developer's side project that ranks the best episodes of any TV show, earning roughly $1,000 a month from display ads and streaming affiliate links.

Founder interview, self-reported 素材未提及SEO 自然搜索Reddit 剧集子版块播客导流

Primary source: View original

Real-demand verdict

Real demand

It replaces the chore of hunting through scattered articles to find a show's best episodes by aggregating ratings into one objective ranking. Steady search growth and organic user voting show people keep coming back.

How it makes money

Visitors use the rankings for free; the site earns from display ads (Monumetric managed network) and affiliate commissions by sending users to Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, Vudu, and CBS All Access to buy or subscribe.

What old behavior it replaces

Digging through scattered articles and forum posts to find a show's best episodes

Where the first customers came from

Posted pages for shows he knew well to the matching Reddit show subreddits, openly labeling the links as his own site, using the response to validate the idea.

Acquisition channels SEO 自然搜索Reddit 剧集子版块播客导流

Tactics you can copy

01Pull data from open APIs (TheTVDB, Trakt, TMDB) into your own database, seeding roughly 2,000 popular shows upfront so pages don't hit APIs on every visit.
02Launch quietly and wait months for search indexing, then put dev effort into SEO and retention; search ends up driving 90%+ of traffic.
03Place Amazon, iTunes, Hulu and similar affiliate links right on the ranking pages so visitors can buy the episode immediately after reading.

Moving it to an AI business

The aggregate-public-data + SEO long-tail pages + affiliate monetization playbook transfers directly to AI tools: turn scattered public data (model benchmarks, tool comparisons) into structured pages, win long-tail search traffic, and monetize via affiliate or referral links.

Evidence and limits

Self-reported numbers are unaudited — treat them as leads, not facts

Founder interview, self-reported

Revenue basis · Founder self-reported, unaudited (see source page)

What evidence is missing

Revenue is founder self-reported (~$1,000/mo, page shows $1.3K), unaudited, no Stripe verification.
No breakdown of ad vs. affiliate revenue, nor conversion rates or average order value.
No data on acquisition cost, retention, or how user voting affects revenue.

Primary source

https://www.starterstory.com/stories/how-i-built-and-monetized-a-website-side-project-ranking-tv-shows ↗