Problem #1: Lot of traffic, little visits In this thread I will share, my expierence, what steps I am taking to make my free image hosting website more profitable. A month ago I bought a website: www.heyimage.com When I bought it, it was receiving 2000 visits a month, and making something like 3000 GB traffic a month. For this amount of traffic You need VPS hosting. Of course most traffic was from hotlinked images. So website was loosing like -100$ each month. Then I reprogrammed website, that instead of giving hotlinked image, I give entire page, with adverts, and that image. After that: Visits a month: 60 000 Traffic: ~300 GB per month. I am attaching screenshot of google analytics: Should I also share, how I am solving other problems?
The dude got brains And pleaze Mailzas, share your current profit and target for 2008. I never really heard of how file hosting site make money, I guess it would be a mix of CPM and CPC...
yup,me too!! PS: if you can tell us How much do you pay for the server or vps you have/Month . Thanks !
great minds think alike. I had recently purchased a catchy domain name for this purpose as well and I too decided to go the full page route. Just haven't started designing anything yet though.
Lethal7, Sure by posting pictures Here I will get 100 or 200 clicks to my website. But that is nothing to image hosting websites. If You do it right You can easily get 2000 - 4000 visits a day. Will update on this later. medaa25 Thanks for a warm welcome. Well my target is to sell this website back for 10 000$, currently website does not generate profit, this is still problem need to be solved, working on that now. Image hosting website, I think make most money by showing CPM ads. Users which are coming to see pictures, to click on ads rarely. retro: For VPS I am paying 75$/month now. Maybe could get that cheaper, because I am using only 20% bandwidth now. But I do not care much now, because, when I will start building traffic, I need good server. Darkmessiah: Use script. To do everything Yourself, will take too much time.
Problem #2: Plenty of visits, low pageviews. After I implemented full page change, I also added google analytics to the account. One of metrics is "pageviews per visit". On my website it was something like 1.2, that means that on average one visit views like 1.2 page per visit. And this is very low. Then I added 5 small thumbs next to the image. For me(programmer) this was an easy change. If You wish to view thumbs, click on this graphic: How that affected metric? It jumped to about 2.0 - 2.12 pageviews per visit. For me it should be additional 50 000 page views per month. Chance to deliver more advertisement to a users. Here last 7 days screenshot to prove that.
EXPERIMENT #1: INCREASE TRAFFIC EXPERIMENT > Can you share how you got all that traffic? Today will share failed experiment, later will share good methods of bringing more visits, before writing, want to get some good stats. When I bought this website. I paid for it 200$, It was receiving about 30 million hits a month, and around 2000 visits. When I thought that instead, of hotlinked images, I can deliver my default image, with an URL written on it. STATISTICAL DATA: Visits: 2000 month Hits: 30 million MY ASUMPTIONS: 1 visitor will take max 1000 hits. (let's assume one visitor, will request max 1000 small images(parts of webpage, css files, .html etc) 2/3 requests will be porn If I deliver my own image, with an URL written on it, one of 1000 visitors will enter URL in browser. CALCULATIONS: 2000 visits * 1000( So we have about 2 million hits. 30 million - 2 million = 28 million requests of images ~20 million of porn image requests. So I calculated, that by implementing this I should get +20 000 visits a month. Here is default.jpg(adult elfes) I used: http://www.heyimage.com/viewer.php?file=ir6jubo4c0chqt0juqzq.jpg RESULTS: Traffic almost not increased. I did this for a few days only. For me it was much better to deliver FULL PAGE, instead of hotlinked IMAGE. FreeSpace: How redirection works? You write a .htaccess file, with a rules: If (request full_image AND TYPE =IMAGE) THEN REDIRECT TO viewer.php?file=requested_file. to all Please write more feedback. Do You like my writing style? Not too much technical details? Easy to understand? Could be used for your image host? NEXT UPDATE: Fighting with a porn images
I am very interested, infact I uploaded an image haha. you wanted feed back, Yes I like your writing style it was very easy to understand There were not too much technical details, it was just the right amount I am thinking of making an image host so yes it could, could you please say which script you use?
PROBLEM #3: Fighting with a porn images If You own an image hosting website, You know that much of pictures uploaded is porn. When I bought website, it was showing porn, and google adsense on same page. First thing I did, I removed google adsense. Then on admin panel, I implemented posibility to set picture, as porn, good, and neutral. Was quite simple, maybe took 1-2 hours of my time only. (Later took some more time, to show correct type thumbs for full image). Then I manually started selecting between porn/good images. After 600 images, I become asian porn expert. Also I could tell You, that to look at that much porn is not fun at all. Also I am very lazy guy, so I started to think how to skip this. First idea was to hire someone, but at this time, I do not have any free money at all. So I thought that I should separate porn/good images, by a script. SCRIPT, WITH AI, FOR SELECTING BETWEEN GOOD/PORN IMAGES I implemented algorithm, that each time porn/good image is requested, I set to the refering website +1 porn, or +1 good. Then if "neutral" image is 5 times requested from a "porn referring website", its type is set to "AUTO_PORN", or "AUTO_GOOD". Then website administrator from "MASS EDIT" mode, confirms like 20 images per time, it's really much faster than selecting one by one. Script per 100 images, makes something like 1-2 mistakes only. First day script was quite busy, and identified ~1000 referer sources, and preselected something like 800 images. Here a referers screenshot from database, please take a look. Currently I have ~2000 distinct refering domains, and about 3000 identified images. Other images seems are not requested very much, I should delete them. DIFFERENT ADS FOR BLACK / WHITE ZONE Then, on my main page I show only good images. And also I separated ad areas. I show one ads for good images, and another ads for porn images. On good images, I added google adsense account. However it was not showing ads at all. After a week, I got email from google that they disabled ads for my website, because it has some adult images, and they also emailed few URL's with adult images . So I swithed to another ads companies, will write more on this later. P.S. In case You are wondering, how much traffic I am getting from digital point, here is screenshot, as always. Also question to all my readers, would you like me to share with you problems, which I am solving now, or I should share only things, where i alreaddy found a solution, so You could copy me?