I wanted to share an update on my directory project, beefnear.me. I launched it about three months ago, starting from scratch by pulling in data from a couple of existing directories and making it more useful and visually appealing.
Since then, growth has been pretty flat. I tried a mass email campaign to listing owners and saw mixed results, but I didn’t have the time to properly follow up and turn those leads into anything meaningful. More recently, I have been posting replies in Reddit threads when people ask about the niche, and that has brought in some decent traffic.
This week I turned on Google Ads mainly to experiment since I had never used them before. The site is generating around $0.20 per day, which is not much, but it has been interesting to see how the process works. Ads have always felt a bit mysterious to me. They do make the site look worse, so there is a trade-off.
I have not spent much time optimizing the listings, and while I could do more there, I do not have much extra bandwidth right now. Overall, it has been a fun side project to build in WordPress with GeoDirectory. I am not sure what the long-term future holds, but I plan to keep seeding traffic through social channels and see where it goes.
Earnings
Right now the site averages about 50 daily views, which works out to $0.20 a day or roughly $6 a month in ad revenue. When you scale that rate out, the picture becomes clearer: 500 daily views would bring in around $61 a month, 5,000 views would be about $610 a month, and 10,000 daily views could generate around $1,200 a month.
The math is simple about $0.004 per view, but it highlights two big things for me. First, display ads alone are not a quick path to meaningful revenue unless you can drive significant traffic. Second, ads are just one piece of the puzzle. They make the site look worse, and the payout is limited compared to other potential models like affiliate sales, sponsored listings, or premium rancher profiles.
Still, this exercise has been valuable. It puts numbers behind what “flat” traffic really means and gives me benchmarks to aim for as I keep experimenting with outreach, social seeding, and SEO. Even if ads never become the main revenue stream, they’re a useful lens for understanding how traffic translates into value.
The Ads…
The ads are pretty terrible, you have to admit.
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