Niche sites
Run a travel spot directory earning from ads and bookings
Build a website with one page for every place of a single type, such as hot springs, trails, campgrounds, climbing spots, or dive sites, with browsing by country, filters, and a map. People planning trips find it through Google, and the site earns from display ads and hotel bookings.
The hard part: gathering accurate details for hundreds of places and waiting months for Google to send steady traffic.
Who pays
Ad networks like Mediavine pay for page views from trip planners, and a hotel booking partner like Stay22 pays a commission when a visitor books a stay through the site. shubham_habib reports that a hot springs database site gets 125K monthly visits and earns from both, but does not share any revenue figures.
How to build it
Choose one type of place
Pick a place type people search for by name and location, such as hot springs, trails, campgrounds, climbing spots, or dive sites. Check that searches like '<type> near <city>' bring up lists rather than one dominant site.
Collect the places into a database
Gather names, locations, and details from public sources such as OpenStreetMap and official park listings, and store them in Supabase. Claude can help write the scripts that collect and clean the data.
Tag each place by type
Run each entry through a decision model (a fast AI that only makes yes/no or sorting calls) to tag it, for example wild pool, resort, or public bath, and whether a hike is needed. These tags power your filters.
Build one page template
Use Claude Code to build a site on Vercel with one page layout used for every place, plus country and category pages that link them together. Add a map view and filters.
Add hotel booking links
Sign up for Stay22 and add its hotel map or links to each place page, so visitors can book a stay nearby.
Apply for display ads
Once traffic meets the ad network's minimum, apply to Mediavine or a similar network and place ads on your pages.
Sources on X
- shubham_habib · Oct 13, 2026
shubham_habib reports that a 10-month-old hot springs database site gets 125K monthly visits and earns from Mediavine ads and hotel bookings through Stay22. The poster says the site is 100% automated and ranks because one page layout is reused for thousands of specific searches. The poster also says the idea can be copied for trails, beaches, campgrounds, climbing spots, and dive sites.
Ideas are curated from public posts and untested by us. Read the full note.