Hi, I am developing this brand new image upload site. Name its great and intuitive. Receives almost 2k visits a day with no advertisements at all. I need some advice on how to monetize it. We are planning to go for a better script, but all opinions are good. Thanks in advance
I ran an image hosting website in the past. Horrible conversion rates. Here are my ideas for monetizing a free image host: 1. Sell text links in the footer 2. Ditch adsense and get phpadsnew and sell banner space. You can also rotate affiliate banners. If you still really wanted adsense, you can rotate that too. 3. Submit to free-webhosts.com Sent 500 uniques per day to my site 4. Random image. Great for more ads. THE GOLDEN RULE 5. MAKE SURE YOUR WEBHOST ALLOWS ADULT CONTENT! I had a few people upload adult content then email my host saying there was adult content on my site. Basically got it shut down.
Running an Image host can be hard work as has already been mentioned. It is possible to do OK - if you can offer something different. I run 2 image hosting sites and it only takes a couple of Adult images on a popular site to burn a lot of b/w. Yesterday, I had 2 images I missed for 10 hours and burned 45Gig! You need to be able to offer something different than what other Image hosts do. The hardest thing is to get it off the ground. My 2 image hosts are profitable, but this is only due to the fact that I can and do drive a lot of traffic to them from my other sites. There is synergey between my img hosting and one of my other sites - the referer stats show that a lot of people move between the 2 sites. The other site makes me a lot more for a lot less effort, and if it wasn't for the synergy I built up I would have dumped the Img host a long time ago. 1 of my sites is subscription based and it is far more profitable than the other one which only shows ads. The subscription site additionally uses approx 15% of the resources of the ad based site. Don't let me stop you from trying, but just be aware it will probably take you a long time to turn a profit from it.
How about catching email addresses on the way in: When a user uploads an image, get them to enter an email at the same time. When they upload, send a deletion link to their email account. Then you've got a hairy great email list to market to! Even better - get people to categorise the images, and then you can market to different sections of the list. Ooooh, actually, forget you heard that. I'm going to do it