LOT OF THINKING TODAY HERE MY STATS UPDATE Website seems start to earn 2$ a day, but it's still only 8%, of income, it should produce be be sold for 10 000$. Also stats, show that in one month I got 60k visits, and 120k pageviews BACKGROUND OF HEYIMAGE.COM I think You need to know some things, how I started heyimage.com. I have one great business idea, I think it could be something bigger than an amazon.com, or other multimillion websites. However I thought that I should start from a smaller website, to see if my ideas are working. Then flip that small website, sell it, get some capital, and than run that big idea. So today I thought, "should I sell heyimage.com or develop it more" and come to conclusion, that heyimage.com must be developed more, sold for target price, and then I could start another idea. SOCIAL MARKETING Yesterday I tried to get some traffic from social websites. Seems I failed. However I learned a lesson. Do not try to rush things, to learn something, You need time. It's better to learn less things, but learn them more deaply. By the way Mubin in his ebook has some quality advices, how You should use social websites to Your advantage to get more exposure to Your image host, by trying a little, I can confirm it works. First test produced 790 visits. Will update later on this. MY NEXT MOVE? UPLOAD MORE IMAGES TO A FORUMS Sure that's working, and by doing that wisely I think I could get something like a 5000 visits a day. But for me it's boring work, sure I can do this if i need to, but would be better to find a model where a users uploading these pictures for me. ADVERTISE ON FORUMS Advertise on forums to get top uploaders use my image hosting service? If i manage how to reach cost, time effectively these people, I would get plenty of traffic everyday. OR CHANGE HEYIMAGE.COM MODEL? If You know on internet there some image hosting websites, which pay it's users for hosting images. Maybe I should switch to that model? RESEARH ON ALEXA.COM shows, that these type of websites gets popular quite fast. Leader is shareapic.net. But by looking at their website I see 2 things at least which would increase their revenue for sure. Here they google analytics stats, if you are interested: Few smaller websites got to a top 1000 alexa, in one year. Quit fast? GOOD - I hink it should be easy and fast to get new members. - I see revenue sharing model is poping everythere. Should be a trend to ride. - Users will be much more active - Less competition, much less websites use this model BAD - Need good security system, weekly DB backups, so on - Needs accounting - What if users will send low paying traffic? (oh I can defeat that with GEO package, also defeat bots, with javascript check) WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ON THIS?
ndreamer Well hotlinking not worked for me. Maybe You will be more popular if you let users hotlink, but you will pay much more for hosting. Would be interesting if You could share on that thread, how You do business, some of Your stats, visits, revenue, expenses. RLKuhn101 Your weakest part is traffic. Please use "celebrity sharing method", and in few weeks You can easily get Your website to 500 - 1000 per day level. And after that come back to my thread and share your success with others.
Yes it's forums. But please do not repeat my mistakes. Spend time learning that. Read my posts in this thread carefully. Go find 4 - 5 celebrity forums, start from smaller ones. Register there, read for a while. After 4-5 days post some photos, see if people replying to You, try to gather some interest. Do not post more than one post per forum per day.
Do you have list a large celebrity forum..? Please share with us or please PM me.. This thread very interesting.. I have run image hosting since 6 month ago.. But never success..
Yes I have a list, but to make a list it's simplier than to make quality posts. So I will not share a list. I do not want people take a list and make bunch of spammy posts, Sorry.
CHANGING WEBSITE MODEL I thought for a while and finally decided to switch website to new model, and pay its users for hosting images with us. Basically I made this decision for 2 reasons: * Less competition for this model websites * Will be easier to get members and uploads. Today I started programming, at first I made user earning interface. That was quite easy, finished in 4 hours. Will make "history" tab later. Take a look: STARTED IMPLEMENTING SECURITY SYSTEM: 1. Filter cheap traffic from asia, and not pay for it. Accomplish that I got a GEO IP database, but it is 500 Kb packed Seems server will get 500 Kb overhead everytime someone views a picture. Would be best to load that in RAM at least, but my host support said that imposible, on linux, is that true? 2. EXCLUDE PAGE REFRESH Another problem Why? When website will get 100 000 page views a day, I have to put 100 000 records in database, and search throught them. Could be that just for this I will need new server, when website gets a bit more popular. Well will implement this anyway, later can search for optimization methods. Would be really gratefull, if someone could give expert advice on this.
These are great insights. I have a question regarding your very first post, though. How did it happen that when you changed the hotlinked image to a full page that you increased pageviews x30, while at the same time reducing bandwidth. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you did, but it seems like by forcing a page to the users, who presumably just wanted the pic, you would have reduced use, not increased it so much. Confused, TSE
Hi, You see some of users hotlinked "full" images in forums. After change, they started not to show, that is why decreased bandwidth. Other users seems shared links to "full images" on forums. So before change, when someone clicks on them they would get hotlinked image on my site. But after change they get "full page" instead of image. And I get 1 page view, instead of 1 hit. That is why visits/pageviews increased so much.
It tooks me some time to read all of these & checking all the pictures , but it really worth it! So thank you soooooooo much i have 2 questions , i hope you could answer me 1- Do you think running image-hosting could make 2$ a day? (as its the vps price) 2- What's the ads-company you are using for CPM? Beside that , Yes you could run the script in the ram. *which will speed the loading time* To do that you would need to play with apache config and setting it to use /dev/shm (which is ram , and i am not sure if you could try /tmp) other thing to do is setting s script to copy your site/scripts to the ram folder (because on each time your reboot your server , you know that things in ram would be gone) , also i guess you might be interested in lighttpd.
You CAN make more than $2/day with an image host. My personal best is a bit over $10. However it's not easy business, you have to do some research and constant work. The more you work, the more you make. Mihai
isnt this kind of traffic very cheap like masalaboard santabanta and other celebrity and porn forums.. i think this kind of traffic can lead to google ban.. i think.. its better to avoild image and file host.. they deal with either adult or warez both what adsense dont like.. for adbrite or popups i think its fine..
Yes, i'm using adbrite , and there is no problem even when they upload porn pics, you just delete them, buy you get no problems with them .
Yeah, that's fine for a small newer site, but when you're getting thousands of uploads daily, there is no way to manually keep up with checking each file uploaded.
INCREASE WEBSITE USABILITY, REVENUE Yesterday I worked for a while, to increase usability, I think that should increase page views a little, and lower bounce rate. From Gallery view I removed all, unneeded elements. Here before, and after screenshots. Took only 30 mins. Made a nice javascript resize/max_out feature. Now when You view an image it will be auto resized, when You click back on it will max out, just like on other big image hosting websites. Click below if You want to see: INCREASE REVENUE PER PAGE VIEW According to some researchers, most visible zone, in website is upper left corner. In that space I added WidgetBucks.com code. Let's hope it will be clicked much. REVENUE SHARE USER PART - COMPLETED Finally completed user part - payment program (where i will pay my users 0.2$ per 1000 image views). That was lot of work. Made that only one image view is counted for one IP per 24 hours, per unique image. Also with a GEO package, I am counting only good countries traffic. GETTING NEW MEMBERS - GOOGLE ADWORDS I believe that more registered users = bigger website value. So I tried google adwords for getting new members. I managed to get one new member for 0.3$. But now as website model changed, I expect to get new members for 0.15$ This seems quite a cheap, because when image hosting websites are sold, I saw that you can get 0.3$ - 1$ per member. Also I can email members, that is one more revenue stream.
energetic: Here I pasted for you most important parts of my code. They could be written much simplier, with .htaccess only! .htaccess RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z/0-9-]+)\.png$ http://www.heyimage.com/script.php?img=$1&type=png&ref=%{HTTP_REFERER} [L,NS] RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z/0-9-]+)\.jpg$ http://www.heyimage.com/script.php?img=$1&type=jpg&ref=%{HTTP_REFERER} [L,NS] RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z/0-9-]+)\.gif$ http://www.heyimage.com/script.php?img=$1&type=gif&ref=%{HTTP_REFERER} [L,NS] Code (markup): script.php - redirect //IF NOT HEYIMAGE, OR THUMBS REDIRECT TO MAIN SCRIPT if ((!strpos($referer, 'heyimage.com')) && (!strpos(strtolower($filename), '_thumb'))) { $type=$_GET ["type"]; $img=$_GET ["img"]; $filename = $img.".". $type; header("Location: http://www.heyimage.com/viewer.php?file=$filename"); return; }; Code (markup): script.php - loading thumbs, on other websites header("Cache-Control:"); header("Pragma:"); header("Set-Cookie:"); elseif ($type=="jpg" or $type=="jpeg") { header ('Content-type: image/jpeg'); $img=imagecreatefromjpeg ($file); imagejpeg ($img); } Code (markup):
overclock099 I put Cpxinteractive and Widgetbucks.com ads. Seems these only generating revenue, everything else generate cents only. Frx, Thanks for comment on RAM settings and lighthttpd. 1. I think I can. But now I am optimizing website from inside, after I will be happy with that, will do more on getting traffic, members and revenue. 2. CpxInteractive, Widgetbucks.com surf4fun Google adsense is not working for image hosting websites anyway, no big point to put it. I am getting about 0.4$ per CPM. Judd Nice website! When You get thousands of uploads, maybe You could ban most active porn uploaders? Or preselect porn, from referer like heyimage.com.