Last month (April 22) I launched a mobile adult entertainment website that allows streaming videos for free. I am now looking for some ideas to help support the bandwidth costs. The reaction has gone quite well, I already have a nice number of visitors for such a short time span. About 2,000 hits a day from 500-800 unique users. Not bad for less than 20 days if you ask me... Anyhow, in this short amount of time I have already racked up 320GB of bandwidth usage at about 85GB average per day with spikes. For instance on May 5 bandwidth usage jumped to 130GB. At this rate I will be hitting the 1TB mark in about 12 days and daily usage is only going to continue to grow. What I was thinking was setting up some kind of subscription service. It would be a small fee like $3.99 a month or $35 a year. My question is, when do you think it would be the right time to test out subscription plans.... Any comments would be great, Thanks.
Hell yes. If your using that much bandwidth I would try to make as much back as possible. Do you currently have any ad's on the site? Because 1tb of bandwidth isn't cheap these days...
Right now I am running BlackLabelAds (by AdBrite) but its not really making me anything... In the last week I made $1 lol Thats the problem.... The user base is still a little to low to really make money off ads like that so I was looking for alternatives. Thanks
That was something i was going to ask, if so, i think a switch to a dedicated server might be the way to go.
Maybe the possibility of selling premium content, or restricting customers use to a certain amount of videos free and anything above that create a range of packages? I would go for it now... Should hopefully finance some more bandwidth!
Post in the Advertisements section here on DP selling ad space on the site. You could probably easily cover it. Steven
try corenetworks 25.00 per month 1k bandwith maybe i can work with them on a 2 tb package for around 50.00 per month
I would sat keep few of the videos free and the rest for subscribed members. To tell you you gonna have to make money to provide better service in near future. $4 per month or so is a good start.
making the subscription system, you will loose visitors. what u can do is put ads on every page so that user have to click on them to access the files. by that u will earn a good amount of money , so u can get more bandwidth or u can get a dedicated server with 10TB of bandwidth. later after becoming ur site popular u can add subcription system for $2 a month. it will be a decent price.
What is the domain name? Also, if you were to ask visitors to pay to view or use content you would loose WAY too many visitors. Keep it free. Ask people to give donations, or just add an option to see extra things that normal members would not get. Add a private section that only premium members can see. Your site seems great, since you say it's only been up for 22 days then you might be the next youtube o.o? The best of luck, mate .
First of all get a compressor for your videos. That should make a HUGGGGGE difference in the size of your videos which in return uses less bandwith.
Have you tried using memcache yet? If you compressed those files and used memcache that should save you a HUGE deal of BW. Secondly, I think making a "private" section, with perhaps some forums and other interesting places would be the way to go. If the bills are getting to be too much, you can restrict access after viewing X amount of video's before they have to signup, make them confirm the email address and send out a weekly newsletter, you can sell links etc. Just a few idea's good luck