About Alex21c Recommendations Project
The project(Alex21C's Recommendations) was the outcome of M.Tech(Computer Science & Engineering) Thesis Work held in between AUG-2015–OCT-2017, carried out at CGC-Landran (Mohali) affiliated under PTU (Punjab Technical University). Thesis work was completed in OCT-2017 but, we were not satisfied with the project. The goal was to Design a Recommender System using Machine Learning Techniques (such as Artificial Neural Network) which outperforms the existing Recommender System as was proposed in the base paper(Rating Prediction based on Social Sentiments from Textual Reviews | DOI: 10.1109/TMM.2016.2575738 | proposed by Lei. et. al. in 2016 | Published by IEEE Journal under IEEE Transactions on Multimedia).
Buying Domain Names and Setting up the Website
On 15th of December 2015, Alex21c.in was bought followed by Alex21c.com on Jan 09th of 2016.
Recommend.Minimalistic.Alex21c Official Launch
On March 18th of 2017, The development of Alex21C's Recommendations begins and we begin Recommending Laptops followed by other products such as Laptop Backpacks, Backpacks and Rucksacks etc.
Monetization and Covering the operating costs
We bought Domain Names and Linux-Hosting as well from Godaddy around ₹2700. For the first year they gave some discounts on initial purchase as usual but the renewal costs were too high for the forthcoming years. We are students as of FEB-2018, and were not interested in having a job so all the expenses were brought from our pocket money. For Monetization we used Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliate Program.
Our First Sale
We made our first sale of ₹156.74 on APR-02-2017 via Amazon Affiliate Program. We admit that we do have google adsense but due to our lack of good traffic it was not working well for us (just made $6.89 (USD)) as of FEB-2018 and the withdraw limit is $100. whereas in case of amazon affiliate program it is just ₹1000.
The Negative Return on Investment
Since our first purchase of Alex21c.in and .com domains from GoDaddy, we went crazy in buying most of other Top let domains for our Alex21c from Godaddy and ended up with buying(Liabilities) driven by fear of loosing the bus:
- ethosoflifescience.com
- fantasypeace.com
- xraypixy.com
- and 2 other expired domains which we were not able to pay for renewals.
80% of the money was paid from our savings for the purchase and renewals of the above domains. As of FEB-10th-2018 we have paid Godaddy total of ₹58706.59 for the Domains Purchase/Renewal and Web-Hosting Purchase/Renewal. On contrast of this received ₹7567 from Amazon for the promotion of their products. Thus ended up with Negative Returns on Investment. We soon realized that we can't pay anymore for the Renewal of Top Level Domains of Alex21C such as (alex21c.org, alex21c.net and Alex21c.co.in) and soon will be leaving them as it.
From where are we?
We are from Sunder Nagar, Himachal Pradesh, India.