Minimalistic "typing speed" testing website with 20M+ visits/m

Intro

Monkeytype.com is a simple, minimalistic website that allows visitors to test their keyboard typing speed.

The domain was dropregged a few times until the current owner got it in 2019. The project is owned and operated by 1 person - Jack Miodec.

Traffic

The website manages to get 20+ MILLION monthly visits per month, with approximately ~5 million unique sessions.

The majority of the traffic comes from the USA, with Australia, and Canada also being in the top 5.

The owner managed to amass a really loyal fanbase and transform a random domain name into a go-to place to test your typing speed online.

As you can see in the image below, the top keywords this website ranks for are “branded“ keywords like “monkeytype“ or “monkey typing“.

According to Similarweb, approximately ~67% of the traffic is direct - meaning, people directly type “monkeytype .com“ in the browser.

The organic traffic, aka SEO traffic, comes in the second place with ~30%.

As you can see the “Monkey Type“ brand is very popular.

FUN FACT: There is even a project using the “monkey-type.org” domain (created in 2022), which apparently capitalizes on the real Monkey Type brand’s success, and manages to get about 400K visits per month.

Monetization

The website, as it’s written in their privacy policy, is monetized with Playwire.

They still use Google Adsense under the hood - Playwire is just an ad-management company that maximizes the earnings of display ads.

Another very well-known website that’s partnered up with Playwire is Chess.com.

In my original post on X, I estimated the earnings to be from $70K to $130K per month, here is where I got this number from.

As Playwire itself states, a website monetized with Playwire makes AT LEAST $50K per month with 5 Million monthly sessions.

For those who don’t know, 1 session is NOT the same as 1 page view.

1 session is 1 unique visitor, whereas a page view is how many pages that unique visitor viewed.

That being said, if we measure Monkeytype’s earnings based on PAGE VIEWS, according to Playwire it should be somewhere between $50K and $700K per month.

On the other hand, if we measure Monkeytype’s earnings based on UNIQUE SESSIONS (which as we know is roughly ~5 Million), the earnings should be somewhere between $50K and $185K per month.

Here is another statement from Playwire:

“Anything less than $50,000 per month at 5 million monthly sessions is unacceptable. But really, with this much website traffic, you could be pulling in up to $185,000 per month”.

With all the data we have now, we can see that Playwire’s minimum revenue per 1000 sessions for websites with ~5M sessions is $10, with the maximum being $37.

Considering that the majority of the traffic comes from the USA, and based on my experience with similar ad networks, I estimate that number to be between $12 and $26 - hence the estimated $60K-$130K number.

There are also options on the website to donate or subscribe to Patreon. At some point, they even had a merch store (monkeytype.store), but it’s currently redirecting to a “coming soon“ page.

Tech Stack

As we can see on their GitHub page the website is mainly written in Typescript.

You could really use whatever tech stack you like for building a similar project. Personally, I would probably use vanilla JS and Tailwind CSS for styling.

With the help of ChatGPT, Claude, or more advanced tools like Cursor, you can have a working prototype in a few hours if not sooner.

That’s a Wrap

I hope you enjoyed the read.

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I’ll try writing detailed reports like this at least once per week.

Feel free to contact me on X if you need guidance with development or would like to suggest a similar project for a detailed breakdown.

Take care.