How to measure the success of a website

The other day, a friend of mine asked me how one can measure the success of a website. He had just published his updated site, which serves as a CV and showcases his academic work and side projects.

Looking at it on different levels

There are three perspectives (and probably a few more) that come to mind when looking at website success on different levels:

1. The commercial perspective
2. The traffic perspective
3. The intrinsic perspective

A purely commercial perspective would be to say, for example, "I want my website to earn 2,000 Dollars a month" or so and build systems that try to achieve that. There are many different business models to go about that. Then your website turns into a business.

You could set traffic goals and try to get as many clicks as possible, but those are vanity metrics. Because nowadays, especially with all the AI bots crawling the internet, you can't really distinguish which clicks are from people and which are from bots. What do clicks tell you anyway?

All other things aside, what's the point of knowing you have 2,500 visitors a month on your site or 200,000? It is just a relative number. Coming back to the business perspective: There are websites with millions of traffic that don't make money, and there are websites with 250 visitors a month, but they sell a product that costs 10,000 Dollars, like a consulting service, and so that website makes a lot of money.

Another perspective is looking at it from the act of building itself and the personal satisfaction you feel when building. That's why I originally started to build websites when I was 14 years old. I thought the medium was cool, and I enjoyed the process - that's why I kept doing it. I loved to tinker with a bit of HTML and to see the changes on the page. Later, I found out that people have content websites, and it was my dream to make money with my own website at some point. I just found the medium "website" to be fascinating.

In the beginning, I just worked on my own projects as a hobby. Later, it evolved into people paying me money to do their websites for them, because I was knowledgeable in that domain. Later in my career, I also worked in different job positions that were all related to working with websites in one way or the other.

I noticed that working for someone else, whether as a freelancer or an employee, brought a lot less joy to me, but having to provide for a family and having grown-up responsibilities, I bite into the sour apple. But I noticed that it wasn't why I had started out to do it anymore: out of my enjoyment of building websites and enjoying the process. My art, my playground, just felt different from working for the man.

Many people know this feeling from their field. It's natural and part of the process.

What about Hintessence?

So with Hintessence, I have the fantasy that in five or ten years I might be able to earn a living with it. But maybe by then the internet has changed so fundamentally that such a business model no longer works. Maybe I have to upload dance videos to social media to get traffic. I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. It could also be that everyone has AI in their cell phone and no one is interested in human-written content anymore. I have no idea how all of this will turn out. Will people even pay for content in the future?

There are always people who use new internet trends very opportunistically and get rich quick. Then there are many who don't make it. Survivorship bias makes us often only hear about the successes, not the many more failures. Maybe I will reach my tribe of 150 people all over the world because I've been writing for 10 years in a row for no money, and those 150 people will donate a small amount of money so I can make a living from my writing. I don't know. Perhaps they are willing to donate an obolus to me, because they trust me and my research skills more than an AI. If they pay me 10 euros a month, I would have a nice side income from that in 10 years. No idea. That would be my success.

I'm just noticing that for me, the work that engages me is the process of researching a topic that has my brain stuck to it anyway. I do my studies on it and write about it. It's like a checklist for me. I'm making my checklists for myself, my evidence-based checklists, because I get better at life when I know that these are the things I can do and bring it into a structured format and publish it if someone else is interested.

I enjoy this process intrinsically and that is success for me.

And what about my friend's website? Or your website?

I'm writing this to you, the reader. So with your website, when you feel like having a cool website online isn't enough, then you can set yourself a goal that fits your definition of success.

My old boss has a comparison site, and he has been hard-coding it for over 10 years. It earns him a very good income and allows him and his family to travel the world. He has built systems and affiliate links, and it's just this one website as a cash cow that he's been working on. That is success for him.

If you don't want to create an online business, you have to find out what success means for you:

• Is it that you get to know other researchers who are working in a similar field?
• Is it that you attract two consulting gigs per year because people from different industries are interested in your research and want you to implement it as a white label solution in their business and pay you 20 grand for it?
• Is it that you simply create this habit of building and publishing in public?
• Is it that you might get a job offer from someone who celebrates your work?

You can define what success means to you.

There is no one way of defining success. With websites and in life. It's highly subjective.

See the books "Finite and infinite games" and "The infinite game" to learn more about the concept of infinite play.