i purchased a url shortening site around 3 months ago, installed statcounter on it and a hostgator link, bit of promotion etc and statcounter shows a few visits a day around 30-50 per month so nothing to write home about, busy with epn and other sites etc. yesterday I logged into cpanel stats not statcounter to check the site and hell its gone mad! around 600 hits per day, but not to the index page but through the redirect script, and that shows in cpanel stats as referral links. guess what they are 99% from craigslist from about every state in the US and going to ebay, seminar promotions etc. site is now a page rank 3 and climbing on alexa. so anyone have any ideas on how I can monetise this traffic? any help much appreciated.
that is the page you see while the redirect occurs right? I don't know. I'll have to find out, I can adjust the length of time the redirect takes I know that, its currently set to 1 sec. I just want to be careful not to upset whoever is sending all this traffic otherwise they might go somewhere else. I was wondering if anyone else was monetising this sort of traffic. Or maybe I let the pr build and then sell the site based on pr.
If i thought for a second I was forced to look at an ad before the URL goes through, id be gone...these sites are dime a dozen, in fact im getting ready to create my own for my benefit, but at the same time, others will be allowed to use the service as it would be an added tool to what I already have. I do not think you can make money off of this, as with many other scritpts out there, people use this service for one simple reason, they want to shorten/hide their own affiliate links...im just saying adding this as a tool to an existing site that sells would do much better then trying to turn this script into a sole money maker, I do not think you will have much luck with that. I am curious to know how people are using your script, they have to go to the home page to signup...but you stated people are using the redirect, but no hits on the home page....
no need to sign up, you just enter a long url with a "seed" and then you obtain the short url. using the short url does not bring you to the home page but the redirect page. brokenscript.com is the script I use, thats not the site though. so someone is generating a bunch of short urls and then using them on craigslist in their ads. someone clicks on their ad and that is the traffic thats passing through my redirect page, around 500-600 uniques per day. so all they see is my redirect page for around 2 secs, i can vary this time in the admin panel to whatever I want and I can put an ad here as well (currently none) but if I do that, am I going to piss the guy off who organises the short urls as I am "hijacking" his traffic. I was just wondering if anyone else had experience with monetising this sort of traffic. Or should I just let the links/PR grow and then sell the site purely based on PR, its currently 3.
dude how does that sites work out? like a script or somehing? i wanted to start my own too can u pm me with some information please.. thanks in advance
Best way to monetize traffic would be increasing your website capabilities, Make your users stick to your website, Give them login access (preferably using openid) , Let them see their previous url submission, etc etc.
"so all they see is my redirect page for around 2 secs, i can vary this time in the admin panel to whatever I want and I can put an ad here as well (currently none) but if I do that, am I going to piss the guy off who organises the short urls as I am "hijacking" his traffic." It would certainly piss me off if I used your service. I don't use this type of service anyway, but I assume the people who do would want their link to go to the page they want the surfer to visit, without potentially losing them to one of your ads. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would stop using your service if they knew you're trying to hijack their hard earned clicks they are getting through their own promotional efforts.