Has anybody ever built a 1 million+ page view site?

[ausername]

$500 a month for 'evergreen' content which never expires is better than $2000 a month on a site which you need to update every day to remain relevant or keep your google news spot, one is a passive income and effectively an investment and one is a low paying job
.

 

[boxfish]

Ultimately fans of grime music will decide whether having a searchable database of every grime album and EP ever made is valuable to them, such a resource doesn't already exist.

I can't decide if you're a troll or not.

In any case I hope it fares better than your forum.

https://www.acorndomains.co.uk/threads/just-got-a-huge-buzz-out-of-a-hand-reg.150786/

 

[ausername]

The forum I haven't built yet?

I've owned forums for 15 years, I've got one now on Invision. Its costing me money, but I'd be interested to know whether you think you are being enlightening when you say forums are difficult to monetise, like:

1) as if don't already know that

and...

2) I haven't seen it said about a thousand times before, and said it myself thousands more. Even said it myself on the thread that you linked (FFS!).

I just find it utterly bizarre that people on here see the sale of a .co.uk domain for £1000 as a huge success, after they've spent 15 years renewing at a tenner a year.

But laugh at a lyrics website which has sat there doing nothing for 12 years but generated $500 a month in income in the meantime and is then sold for $8000.

Can people not see the irony?

There are plenty of people who have made decent money with $1 or $2 CPMs, why do you think the web went through that annoying clickbait phrase where you had to click '1', '2', '3', etc to see all the content. And yes, CPM is the relevant metric here.... because I said page views and not unique visitors in my title.

Just because you have different ideas doesn't mean all of mine will be proved wrong.

The fact that this is my thread and is about sites which achieve 1 million page views per month and you are hijacking it to tell me that forums and lyrics sites shouldn't be built makes you the troll pal.

Because the vast majority of sites which see 1 million page views a month organically will be low paying niches, with low CPM's, and stuff like clickbait, lyric sites, image hosting, big forums etc are precisely the types of sites which can achieve big traffic numbers easily.

Now if my thread said "Anybody built a site earning £5,000 a month in adsense earnings?" then evidently we could start talking about high CPC niches and conversion rate couldn't we....

Go and start a thread called "Has an anybody built a site which gets 1 million hits per month, with a 2% CTR and £5000 a month net profit" if you want.

 

[Edwin]

Looked at starting an image hosting site, where people upload and then embed on forums etc, but difficult to persuade people t use yours over other established competition and people are wary of new entrants dissapearing and killing their photos on forums etc. They seem to just compete on max file size now, but I'd personally want to be quite strict on that to keep storage costs to a minimum. Trying to fill a quirky niche, like being a meme host or purely a gif host is a nice idea (people browse the uploads) but struggling to find an appropriate domain without paying out a fortune.

One snag might be that you'd need to moderate all the images otherwise you'll get people uploading all kind of disgusting illegal stuff that other bigger players police.

 

[ausername]

One snag might be that you'd need to moderate all the images otherwise you'll get people uploading all kind of disgusting illegal stuff that other bigger players police.

Yeah that's another issue, although I suppose the 'virtual PA' from the Phillipines would be the answer to that problem. I actually quit a job at the CPS after a few months when I was 18 because I stumbled across that stuff a couple of times at work and couldn't handle it.

 

[ausername]

Kiddie pics is the only thing I'd struggle to handle I think, also wouldn't know how to handle that in a technical sense.... e.g. do you instantly delete, or do you quarantine and report IP to authorities? Etc etc. So good point, huge and inevitable headache and all for no guarantee of success.

 

[Edwin]

BTW, you probably know about this already, but...
http://www.thebiggestboards.com/

Summarises (many of) the largest forums/discussion boards in the world. Gives you a quick at-a-glance idea of what kind of stuff attracts giga-traffic. Though of course quite often that's because a forum's been around for decades and has become the winner-takes-all of that particular niche.

 

[ausername]

I'm not really a fan of building and running forums to be honest, don't know what I was thinking registering another forum domain.... being trying to pluck up the courage to close the one I already own. Probably room for one forum in my life, so one in one out... I'll promise to myself that I won't start this new one until I've closed the current one

Gaia online used to pay people a few pennies for every forum thread they started, part of the reason they got so huge. No idea if they still do that or not, but I'm sure a lot of their members were just there to make a bit of money.

 

[BeachLife]

People aren't being negative about 'building stuff', just building the wrong stuff.

What's the right stuff?

 

[ausername]

What's the right stuff?

Exactly, always a negative argument to put forward.

"Too saturated"

"Low CPM"

"Lots of moderation needed"

"Needs 3 posts a day to keep Google news"

etc etc. Every business has challenges, pitfalls and everybody trying to make their own way is swimming against the tide. But I think its the people who chase the easy money who never get anywhere, and the people who only focus on the downside who never try. I've managed to pay my bills by working for myself online for 6.5 of the past 7 years, never been easy and never will be.

 

[boxfish]

What's the right stuff?

Well seeing as OP was suffering from 'Post-Panda Depression' and had to go and work in a warehouse after all his sites got killed by Google, the 'right stuff' for him would probably be to build something that wasn't solely reliant on Google SERPs, even more so as he is planning on using scraped content in an area that has already started being targeted by the best scrapers in the business.

 

[ausername]

Well seeing as OP was suffering from 'Post-Panda Depression' and had to go and work in a warehouse after all his sites got killed by Google, the 'right stuff' for him would probably be to build something that wasn't solely reliant on Google SERPs, even more so as he is planning on using scraped content in an area that has already started being targeted by the best scrapers in the business.

I've already told you I run an ecommerce business which pays my mortgage and I'm not bothered if this site makes money, you utter cretin. You need to be better at absorbing information to get away with an avatar of a fish which looks like a sponge, should be a sieve.

Struggling to see how it is any of your business how I spend my time and money, what the hell does it have to do with you?

Good luck with your portfolio of .org.uk domains (you will need it), and commiserations for the short shelf life of all of your own ventures (as per companycheck). Don't try to squeeze me into an accelerator shaped void, I won't fit in it and I do push back.



Now if you don't mind its Black Friday, alarm was set to 6am because it will be a 12 hour shift today for me.

 

[martin-s]

Can't we all keep this nice? What should be a good inspiring thread is descending into childishness.

 

[ausername]

Can't we all keep this nice? What should be a good inspiring thread is descending into childishness.

I have no intention of holding any grudges against anybody or creating some sort of nemisis, but if he dishes it out he can expect a bit back from me and I felt the need to set my stall out early here because I saw how things got for another poster who didn't hold his corner.

But point taken.