Every second pic/video joke email that my friends send me are from sites copying Flickr or YouTube's models. I know bandwidth is cheaper than it used to be, but these websites must be absolute bandwidth hogs. Think they are profitable? The original and top end versions get the biggest CPM deals (and probably all ad spots are 100% sold), but what about all the small and mid sized websites. I find it hard to believe their advertising could support their bandwidth costs. Anyone have an opinion?
I think that they can be very profitable as long as you target only one niche. For example, you could make a youtube clone site dedicated only to pranks which would only have videos about pranks.
Well a video site of pranks and so fourth certainly could be popular, but my question is whether the ad revenue (expected to be mostly CPM and Adsense I suppose) would be enough to offset the costs of the huge bandwidth requirements these sites use up.
Your concerns about bandwidth cost, are imho the biggest single reason why the smaller sites in this sector will struggle to make a stand-alone profitable cost center
BG thats a good point. Bw is the big cost and i read that they do not make profit. If you have your own line and server its fine but if you are on a shared server the hosting will close you down for sure./
Yes. Migt be. 1 GB bandwidth is less than 0.1$. But the problem is you won't find advertisers for this kind of site. Unfortunality, internet is not like TV. Here we want our clients smart, so we target content sites. At tv, the advertiser want their clients dump, so they can sell all the garbage they produce.
well from my understanding (i read it somewhere) that Youtube has yet to turn a profit even though they are going big across the net down't mean they are making money... I wish i could find that article (if someone can prove me wrong please do)
I just gave that example because I don't want to give out the good ideas I came up with . What I mean is, look for a niche that is profitable and focus your video site on that niche, then you can put affiliate products that are highly related to your niche. I think you can definately cover bandwidth costs if you follow that strategy.
If you target international market: Yes, you can make big bucks but you need to be big! 20-30.000 visitors per day at least And you don't get those in a few days! If you DON'T target international market: Yes, and it goes much faster. I did the second one. I have an entertainment website with funny videos, pictures games, forums, etc. but it is only targeted to my country. It is only 1 year old and it is the most popular entertainment website in my country. - Making big bucks too from local advertisers/retail store owners wanting to advertise. The website has been featured several times on local television and radio shows and makes it into magazines every month. So yeah, the best thing to do is go for a niche. Didier
The problem isn't just bandwith, but copyright problems... you must have an iron hand with the content in your site.
Yep. And be ready to receive hundreds of threatening letters asking you to remove contents from the site.