atul |
freenovels.xyz
Yes, I bought another domain FreeNovels.xyz. Another site to read light novels which are again scraped with my code now written in js. I have now scraped same websites with Java and Js. I love scraping if you can’t tell by now. Its fun. Its makes you feel powerful (just kidding). There is so much data you can collect from scraping.
I love scraping these kind of sites, content-heavy and there is an audience who read this stuff. I deployed a small site with 6 novels to start with and chapters scraped from other websites. In a very short time, the site has organic traffic. Yes it was that quick. Now it has decent traffic and I knew there would be traffic for this content no matter who owns the content.
So I decided to build this site to get more traffic and at some point I will be able to monetize this.
infrastructure and maintenance
The site is built with Astro and its entirely static, I have a backend which scraps and store all the data, exposes an API which I use to build the site. I did few optimizations to the Astro side to improve the build time for the site. The site has almost 10K pages.
The site is static and light weight, I just deploy it with firebase and it works great. No backend required. Whenever I feel like I need to refresh data, I just run my cli to scrape new data and update the db, once that’s done I rebuild and upload the site. It fast and simple, fun to do.
what’s the motive
I love seeing traffic on my sites, yes, and may be it will make some money in the future. Not only that I build an Android app for the site and deployed to play store in a day. It was fun, I also created high quality graphics for the Play Store. Got one fake review on the app and now it has bunch of downloads.
why this?
Light novels and manga have great demand and its very likely your content is gonna get exposure. I’m not redirecting my existing ranobe traffic here but trying grow it ground up.
future
Once the site gets more popular more and more users would want to join. And writers would want to publish their original content. My site will then trasition from scraped material to originla content and I can monetize that and have bunch of content-creators onboarderd to drive the site.
conclusion
Just go read something on FreeNovels.