Ive worked out a rough estimate for the running costs of my site. This includes hosting, the domain and the website software. It totaled at about £70 per year ($140 a year) The site would be a movie forum where people can watch movies. I would pretty much guarentee traffic. I think I safely say that I could quite easily get 500+ uniques a day However would I be able to earn that much money back in a year. This would be from adsense and any other advertising programs that I think would suite the site. Please, Im not very confident in risking that money to be honest lol. So I need some second opinions.
500 uniques a day, even for relatively low eCPM niches, will cover that $140 a year several times over.
If you don't have legal rights to display the movies (even if they are hosted elsewhere) your legal risk will far outweigh the potential rewards. It would also be against the adsense TOS to run ads on a such a site.
Ok, Thanks for that The movies would obviously be hosted on third party sites. Also I would not upload them. It would basicly be a movie discussion board but with an added feature of being able to watch movies. But I see what you are saying. Alot of people would be againts the site.
Ill do that. The copyright laws are very complicated. They keep getting amended so they can catch us out
Don't be scared of a risk. If you thought your idea was possibly throwing your £70 then fair enough, get some advice. But for that year, it'll cost you 20 English pennies a day to keep it running. If you get any sort of turn over, you'll cover that pretty fast.
Depending on where you live - the laws are different. For instance here in the UK, the owner of tv-links.co.uk ( the biggest link site ever) was arrested and later released with no charges whatsoever - i know he was arrested but you have to remember this site was massive and was about alexa rank 150. I used to own my own site with about 1200 uniques a day and made some nice $$, never had any trouble with legal authorities, as even 1200 uniques is only small scale really. I used to run yesadvertising and made over $60/month. Google them or see link in my sig!
Unless you are embedding hulu videos you are violating copyright laws. Unfortunately this can get you in a fair amount of trouble, and at the very least your site will get taken down. Maybe you should just scrap the watching movies part and stick with the forum discussion of movies.
Its sort of complicated to explain but it would envolve me submitting links to my site on another one.
To add to my point above. Although i mentioned somebody getting arrested above, i must stress this is the only known case ever.The chances of getting arrested for having a "small" site with 500/day is very very low- tv-links were getting millions of visitors a day.The worst thing that is likely to happen is your site being shut down -although, again, this is a rarity. Perhaps your biggest dillema, is your moral concious, are you happy to promote the spread of copyrighted ( even if it is 3rd party sites) material. Of course if you are, theres a huge market there, with lots of $$$ to make. Just My thoughts.
I have tried to start around 12 sites with only 3 that have really taken off yet but I would say its worth the risk so go ahead.
Why make a forum and not a script to view movies. Forums are for people who can't really do any coding. So they stick to easy posting threads. Just my though.
Spending $140 a year in a project is not risking money. The key here is to not thinking too much. Check that you are not doing anything illegal, build the site, and go build another one. As @norfstar said, you can cover your costs and make a profit, but how much? $280 at year? Again, build your site and don't wait for profit. Build it, and build another one, and aonther one and so one. But the time you have 10 sites online, maybe 9 failed, but the one that succeeded cover all your cost. It's simple math, If 9 of every 10 sites fail, build 11