I built a GPU comparison site, got shadowbanned by Reddit, and earned $200. Here's the full story.

In April 2026, I made a business decision that seemed brilliant at the time: I would grow my GPU comparison site, https://best-gpu.com, by answering strangers' questions on Reddit.

Reddit, as it turns out, had opinions about that.

So here's the whole thing: one guy, 2 domains, 2 Chrome extensions, over 300 Reddit posts, and the long humbling road to my first $200 in affiliate earnings. That's $1.98 a day. For context, a parking meter in a mid-sized city out-earns me by far!

The premise

GPU prices are chaos. The same RTX 4070 can swing 30% depending on the day, the seller, and, as far as I can tell, the phase of the moon. Benchmarks live on one site, prices on another, and nobody tells you which card gives you the most frames per dollar right now.

The idea was simple. People ask the same question on Reddit roughly 400 times a day: "should I upgrade my GPU?" And the answer is always some version of "it depends", delivered by a commenter who is 60% helpful and 40% angry.

I figured I could do better. I built https://best-gpu.com: a comparison site with an upgrade calculator that tells you whether jumping from, say, a GTX 1660 to an RTX 5070 is a smart move or an expensive way to get 12 more FPS in a game you stopped playing in 2023.

The monetization plan was Amazon affiliate links. The traffic plan was me, personally, answering GPU questions on Reddit and mentioning the site when relevant.

So I built https://best-gpu.com: live Amazon prices for ~350 GPU models, each scored on a performance index (70% TimeSpy, 30% TFLOPs), divided by price. One sortable table. Best value floats to the top.

Simple. What could go wrong?

Problem #1: Amazon's beautiful catch-22

To get Amazon prices programmatically, you need access to their affiliate API.

To keep access to their affiliate API, you need 10 qualifying sales every 30 days. Per marketplace.

To get 10 sales, you need traffic. To get traffic, you need a site with prices. To get prices, you need the API. To get the API... you see where this is going. It's the DMV, but for GPU data.

The solution nobody asked for: a Chrome extension

Since Amazon wouldn't hand me the data, I built a Chrome extension (Manifest V3, for the three people who care) that browses Amazon like a very patient, very obsessive shopper. It walks through search results, reads product pages, filters out the garbage (and there is so much garbage) and POSTs everything to my server.

The filtering logic alone is a small novel. Search "RTX 4070" on Amazon and you'll get: actual RTX 4070s, laptops containing an RTX 4070, GPU support brackets, riser cables, RGB fans "compatible with" an RTX 4070, and a mousepad with a picture of an RTX 4070 on it. My regex has seen things.

But it works. The extension now feeds live prices across 2 Amazon marketplaces (US was first, added UK in a later stage), each with its own currency, VAT rules, and locale. I rebuilt the whole site (V2, pure PHP, no framework, fight me) to handle it: geo-detection, hreflang tags, per-country sitemaps, exchange rates. A genuine multinational operation. Revenue: see above.

Problem #2: marketing, or how I got banned from the internet's GPU aisle

Here's where it gets educational.

The natural audience for a GPU value site is, obviously, Reddit's PC building communities. Someone asks "which GPU should I buy" on Reddit roughly every hour, and every single one of them is a person my site was built for. All I had to do was show up in the comments with a helpful answer and a link.

Answering them by hand was slow. Maybe 2 or 3 good replies a day, between finding the threads, reading the specs, and typing out advice. So I did what a developer who has just built one Chrome extension does when he encounters any problem whatsoever: I built another Chrome extension.

This one scanned the PC building subreddits for fresh GPU questions, queued them up in a tidy list, and teed up my answers with the relevant comparison link already attached. It was, and I say this with the confidence of hindsight, extremely smart. My output jumped 5X overnight. I was answering 15 posts a day, each one helpful, on-topic, and pointing at the same domain. I felt like the most efficient man on the internet.

Reader, I had built a machine whose primary output was making me indistinguishable from a bot.

Because that's exactly what Reddit's spam detection looks for: a newish active account, replying at inhuman velocity, dropping the same domain over and over. It doesn't matter that the answers were good. From the outside, "helpful human with a productivity tool" and "spam bot with decent copywriting" produce the same graph. Couple of weeks later, the hammer came down.

The final tally:

• Banned from r/buildapc
• Banned from r/pcmasterrace
• Banned from r/radeon
• Shadowbanned, so for a while I was still cheerfully writing thoughtful comments, at 5X speed, to an audience of exactly zero people. The extension kept working perfectly. Nobody saw a word.

The lesson, which everyone told me and which I have now personally verified at great expense, is that Reddit can smell self-promotion the way a shark smells blood, except the shark also moderates three subreddits.

Problem #3: my users are robots

Once traffic started trickling in, Google Analytics delivered great news: users! Hundreds of them!

Then I looked closer. Roughly 43% of my "users" were bots: waves of traffic from Singapore, China, and Vietnam that visit one page, feel nothing, buy nothing, and leave. My actual humans are mostly in the US, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, France... and Tunisia, which I choose not to question.

If you're a solo founder staring proudly at your GA4 dashboard: I'm sorry. Nearly half of it may be a data center in Singapore.

The pivot(s)

Getting shadowbanned forces a certain clarity. My entire traffic strategy was one Reddit account, and that account was now legally dead. Time to figure out what this business actually was.

First move: I bought a second domain, https://upgrade-gpu.com . The upgrade calculator was my best asset anyway (lowest bounce rate on the whole site, people actually used it), so giving it its own home felt smart. Also, when your main channel collapses, the natural developer response is obviously to buy more domains. This is known in the industry as "diversification" and known to my bank account as "a problem."

Second move: I finally opened Google Analytics properly instead of just admiring the line going up. The audit was humbling:

• 74% of my site traffic was "direct" (translation: a mystery)
• 38% of my users were apparently in Singapore (translation: bots)
• Google organic search delivered a majestic 4 sessions. Four. SEO was a rounding error.

So my Reddit channel was shadowbanned, my organic traffic was four humans, and a large chunk of my "users" were Singaporean robots with no interest in graphics cards. Cool cool cool.

But buried in that wreckage was the actual lesson: I had been renting traffic from Reddit one comment at a time, on an account Reddit could (and did) vaporize overnight. Four organic sessions weren’t just a sad number, it was the biggest untapped lever on the board. Every GPU comparison people search for is a page I could own permanently, and Google can't shadowban me for existing.

So the strategy flipped. Less "sprint to answer 20 posts before lunch", more building pages that answer the question while I sleep. Reddit went from being the engine to being one channel among several, used carefully, at a human pace, like someone who has learned things.

Third move: I stopped leaving international money on the table. GPU buyers exist outside the US, shocking I know, so I set up the UK and Canada affiliate programs too. That's where about $90 of my $200 came from, which means the "minor" markets are pulling nearly half the weight. The pivot that took an afternoon outearned weeks of Reddit grinding.

 

The money, the numbers

And now, the numbers you've been waiting for.

Three weeks in, after 449 affiliate link clicks and 6 orders totaling $707 in ordered revenue, my confirmed earnings stood at a majestic $6.53.

That's not a typo. Amazon's commission rates on GPUs, combined with returns and orders stuck in "pending" purgatory, turned weeks of work into roughly the price of a coffee. I stared at that dashboard the way you stare at a lottery ticket that's one number off.

But here's the thing about affiliate revenue on high-ticket items: it moves on geological timescales. Orders ship. Pending amounts confirm. The compounding kicks in quietly while you're busy being depressed about the dashboard.

Because I know that's why you're here. Everything since April:

• ~4,000 website visits
• ~1,950 affiliate clicks (1,794 US + ~150 UK/CA). Nearly half my visitors click through, which I take as a compliment
• 29 ordered items, 0 returns
• 1.62% conversion rate
• $4,259.46 in ordered revenue for Amazon
• $109.43 in earnings for me (US), plus ~$90 from UK/CA
• ~$200 total

Read that middle part again: I generated $4,259 in sales for a $2.65 trillion company, and my cut was ~$200. Somewhere in Seattle, an accountant briefly smiled.

What I actually learned

• One subreddit will carry everything. Find yours, ignore the rest. The "obvious" niche subreddits were dead zones.
• Broad relatable questions beat niche comparisons. "Is it worth upgrading?" outperformed "5070 Ti vs 9070 XT" every time.
• Being helpful doesn't protect you from spam filters. Reddit punishes intent it suspects, not intent it proves.
• If a tool makes you 5X faster on someone else's platform, the platform will notice before your customers do. Speed is a spam signal. Pace yourself on purpose.
• Affiliate revenue on high-ticket items is a long game. The dashboard will insult you for weeks before the money shows up. Don't quit at $6.53.
• Building the tool is more fun than using the tool. Even when the tool gets you banned.

Outro

If you take one thing from this post: on someone else's platform, being fast and helpful is indistinguishable from being a bot. I built a machine that made me superhuman at Reddit, and Reddit responded by making me invisible. There's probably a Greek myth about this.

Both sites are still up https://best-gpu.com and https://upgrade-gpu.com . The calculator still works. And somewhere out there, 29 strangers are gaming on GPUs they bought because a shadowbanned ghost whispered "yes, upgrade" into the void.

Total earnings: $200. Total lessons: priceless. Total hourly rate: sealed by court order.

Ask me anything. I answer fast. Some would say suspiciously fast.