A year ago I developed an universal video downloader site http://savedeo.com.
I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing).
The site is very lightweight as it doesn't really downloads anything. It just extracts direct links to the files.
There are a great challenges that I have to deal with (like YouTube blocking IPs, sites changing designs all the time, etc.).
You're probably paid per install, unless the distribution model for malware has significantly changed in the past six years.
Assuming $2 per install, that would mean you're infecting 15,000 machines per month.
At bare minimum, this malware you distribute probably maliciously replaces all ads loaded on the infected machine with ads controlled by the hackers who created the malware, and it does this for the remainder of the lifetime of that machine.
The legitimate site operators currently obliviously and naively praising you in the comments here are the very same victims who are robbed by the criminals you are colluding with via this ad-replacing malware you distribute. Their CPM and CPC numbers are suffering because of crooks like you.
All that aside, none of this takes into account the people who are duped into calling the 1-844 number in those popups who then have their bank accounts cleaned out by the scam artist on the other end who succeeds in socially engineering the victim into sharing their credit card details.
What you're doing isn't praiseworthy; it isn't impressive. It's despicable.
Checking that script, we see a lot of "gunggo" references, which is the ad network doh admits to using. Gunggo apparently owns directrev.com, and both are considered pretty shady from what I can gather:
Savedeo.com is ranked 49,679 on alexa. I'm guessing it gets around 9,000 visitors per day. With such little traffic, and no legitimate product or paid services being offered, there is absolutely no remaining way to earn 30k per month other than to spray hapless visitors with the most aggressive/malicious advertisements known to man.
I'm assuming those numbers are ad impression counts. There is no possible way savedeo.com is receiving anything close to that many page views per day. If it were, his alexa rank would be closer to 1,800; certainly not 49,679. I run a site approaching the alexa 2000 range, and it only gets half as much traffic as his ad network statistics screenshot boasts. Since the numbers in this ad network screenshot cannot possibly represent savedeo.com's traffic, we are left to guess what they actually do represent.
Here's my guess: It's the number of ads served to infected machines per day via the malware he helped install through popups like these. Assuming he's infected 25,000 machines, each infected device would only need to maliciously replace 20 legitimate advertisements on victim sites per day for him to reach this absurdly high impression count. If that is indeed what is happening, he's earning roughly $1.50 per thousand ad impressions which is fairly standard.
Alexa is highly inaccurate. My website (http://www.ranksignals.com) have Alexa rank 7,000 with 3,500 visits / day while my other websites with higher traffic have far lower Alexa rank.
My other websites have Alexa rank 23,000 with 15k to 20k visits/day and Alexa rank 250k and 5k visits/day.
I'm interested in how you are extrapolating daily visitors from Alexa rank. You mention having a 2000ish ranked site and knowing the page views from there. I imagine its not a linear relationship. Do you have other data points you are using? Any other information you could be provide would be super appreciated.
Strong words, but I don't disagree. I left a previous job in large part due to the shady advertising companies we were directly connected with, and which I had to integrate. It's really tricky, because the business people on the advertiser's side have all these justifications for why it's a valid model, and the business people on our side had a bigger check than any legitimate provider would give them (same argument the owner of this site is making).
That's pretty awesome. I just tried it out to see how you make money and noticed that you have both banner ads and also open popup-tabs. Are you comfortable sharing how much of the revenue is from the banners versus the popups? Are those the only two streams?
There are no banners only pop-up ads. There are two different providers, one generating around 1/3 the other the rest. I get probably one inquiry a week to test new ad system, which I mostly do. This way I went up from 6-7k a month to beyond 30k.
Awesome! Any recommendations on what pop-up / interstitial providers to use? I have a small site which has free, useful file downloads, and these could work well on that as an additional revenue stream. I have Adsense on there now but it is only pumping out $200-300/Month off of 10K+ visitors.
I actually spent a decent amount of time preventing people from promoting their videos on the homepage. The traffic dropped a bit afterwards but I like to have a real data there, just for the curiosity.
Fair enough, I was more thinking similar to how Google searches do it, a sort of yellow-backed "Promoted" link as an alternate/additional source of income than artificially bumping something to the top through fake downloads
Well, the top videos get barely over couple of 1k views so I don't know how valuable it is.
I am extremely strict with what I count as a hit (I have a whole GEOip & browser combination) so if two people come from the same country with the same browser, it's only one hit, ever.
Speed and simplicity of the design. You can for instance download a whole playlist of videos at once and get a .m3u file that includes all the direct links to the top quality videos.
Mind sharing your provider's name (email is in my profile)? I have a hosted service, in a different space, with a similar demographic. Adsense banned my account (mistakenly may I add) over a year ago and now I'm out of monetisation ideas.
Well, this is a kind of a gray zone. The data hosted on sites like Youtube don't belong to them but to the creators. The site itself doesn't download anything, in a way it simulates what your browsers does.
As a user, that's more complicated. In European Union it's legal. Everywhere else? Hard to say.
The site gives you a direct link to the file. Based on the site behavior and your browser settings, your browser will or start downloading or open the video directly.
Never did anything special. After a month got promoted by Lifehacker which crashed the site so the traffic went back to the original. Everything is WOM.
This must be less legal than Savedeo (which only creates a video link), because if the extracted audio is hosted on the servers it's very likely an illegal copy.
I'm not sure DMCA would help in this case.
Disable popup blocker and click one of the download links - it opens up the download link [I assume to convince you to disable popup blocker] and (for me on this attempt) a bet365 advert in popups
Cool! If you're willing to share, what is the most popular site people download videos for? I was thinking NSFW sites as well, but you said they only account for 0.65%.
I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing).
The site is very lightweight as it doesn't really downloads anything. It just extracts direct links to the files.
There are a great challenges that I have to deal with (like YouTube blocking IPs, sites changing designs all the time, etc.).