<b>I built a site about reading old cemetery records</b>
Month 1: domain cost $12. The niche was genealogy, but specifically deciphering 1800s gravestone abbreviations and burial records — a sub-corner I found because my grandmother's headstone said "æt. 64" and I had no idea what it meant.
Month 4: 20 deep posts, each on one record type. Display ads only — affiliate options were basically zero. Revenue: $30. I almost quit, called it a hobby site.
Month 8: Ancestry forums started linking me as the explainer. Then Pinterest, weirdly, sent 40% of traffic. Traffic 2k → 16k. But my ad RPM was a miserable $6 because genealogy hobbyists don't buy much.
Month 14: I added a $19 printable "old-records cheat sheet" PDF. 3% of visitors bought it. That single product out-earned a year of ads — $1,100/mo vs $640 from ads.
The failure: I spent eight months chasing ad RPM in a niche where the audience has time, not money. Wrong monetization for the crowd.
The takeaway: match the money model to the visitor's wallet, not the traffic number. Passion niches monetize through products and community, not display ads.
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<b>I built a site about reading old cemetery records</b>
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