01

A few days ago, a developer DM'd me asking me to submit my site to his directory, saying it would boost my exposure and SEO.

I opened it up — it was a collection of well-known AI tools. The entire page was logos and outbound links, nothing else.

I've never built a directory site myself, but intuitively, I felt I shouldn't submit. Even if I did, it wouldn't make any real difference.

And that got me thinking — in a world flooded with directory sites, what actually makes money?

02

The approach for most directory sites is pretty straightforward: collect as many products as possible, ride SEO long-tail keywords, and monetize visitors through ads or affiliate links.

The core logic is "how many listings do I have," not "what am I recommending."

So when you open any of these sites, you see a wall of identical cards, each one just an outbound link. The site owner doesn't need to understand a single product — a scraper and a template handle everything.

What's the result?

Short-term, you can grab some traffic from SEO tailwinds and earn a bit from ads. But the ceiling is locked. Because there's nothing the site itself produces — it's just a link between A and B. Visitors come and leave without remembering the site, let alone searching for it by name.

For the listed products, it's the same story. Whether they're listed or not barely matters — the referral traffic is negligible.

03

So what's the more valuable approach?

I looked at a bunch of "directory sites" that actually broke through, and found one thing in common — they're no longer directory sites.

Product Hunt became a product launch platform. Developers actively come to launch because there are real users, media editors, and awards. It charges product launch budgets, not SEO traffic arbitrage.

Toolify, There's An AI For That became databases and leaderboards, selling traffic data, growth curves, and ranking changes. Their users are competitors, investors, and people doing competitive analysis — people willing to pay for data.

Ben's Bites, The Rundown — these newsletters became media outlets. Every recommendation has been written about, used, and comes with an opinion. Readers aren't there to "find tools" — they're there to see "what this person thinks is worth reading this week."

These paths look different, but they share the same foundation: they inserted a layer of something only they can provide — judgment, data, relationships, context.

And judgment and context are precisely what aggregation-style directories can never develop, because they've never "sat with" any single thing long enough.

At the end of the day, a directory site itself isn't valuable. The person behind the directory is what's valuable.

Product Hunt was valuable early on because Ryan Hoover was personally curating it.

Ben writes clearly on his About page: "Today, this newsletter is to share my point of view." Subscribers are subscribing to that point of view, not to AI news itself.

Readers aren't there for links. They're there to borrow someone's judgment.

04

Spinning up a directory site has near-zero difficulty. Grab a template, scrape some data, slap on an SEO template, and you can launch in a week.

And the easier something is to build, the easier it is to copy, and the less pricing power it has.

Business is objective — it looks at value. So do the harder thing.

What's the harder thing?

It's soaking in a specific domain long enough to form judgment that nobody else has.

It's picking the right 10 out of an overwhelming sea of information for your readers, and telling them why it's these 10. It's distilling your thinking, your work, your attitude and perspective into content that only you could have written.

This isn't glamorous and it isn't fast, but it compounds. A year from now, those aggregation directories will still be aggregating. Meanwhile, another group of sites may have become the name "worth searching for" in their domain.

If you're building content, building a product, building anything you want to run long-term, ask yourself one question: Would what I'm doing still work without me?

If the answer is "yes," it's probably not very valuable.

If the answer is "no," then it's just starting to become valuable.