Just Built New Site

over 32,000 Unique visitors in 7 days

[u4eas]

Ok, I am pretty astonished at how fast my little website has grown. I built/finished the site about 3 weeks ago.

In the past seven days, I have had over 32K unique visitors and blown through over 70 GB of bandwidth (I host about 70 flash movies). I was on a 25Gb plan, then upped it to 100GB, and upped it again to 200gb, and now may have to up it to 400-500 gb a month. Which is cool, yet costly.

I slapped on an adsense campaign, and only made about $3.00 in the last day and a half.

It seems our traffic doubles every two days or so. On friday we had served about 16,000 unique visitors.

Im at a loss as what to do. I want to keep the traffic coming, but make some money so I can afford to keep the site up. The way things look now it may get pretty expensive.

So, as far as ads (aside from adsense) how is it best to go about selling them. Who do I target? How do I do this? We dont even know if thats enough traffic to warrant advertisments. This is all new ground to me. For the past five years I have really only worked on corp sites that dont allow stuff like this. Bt this is my own deal (and a buddy).

The funny thing is we really arent ranked well with google yet. I can only imagine what will happen then. Although the #1 guy (for the primary keyword) has a link to our site and he thinks our site is awesome (he even says it next to our link). I cant imagine what will happen when we are in the top ten.

Aside from the ads, Im not even sure what else to do with a site that seems to be this popular. Aside from keeping the bandwith requirements met and keeping the site fresh.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Matt

[bird]

The typical target audience of a Flash movies site is not looking to buy stuff. This means that CTR based ads will perform badly almost per definition, and content matched ads will do even worse. Instead of AdSense, your best bet is to find a CPM based campaign that targets the "funny crowd". If you're lucky, then that will pay enough to cover the bandwidth costs. If you're very lucky, then you'll actually earn money...

[inbound]

You could move to a high bandwidth hosting provider. There is a good one I know of in the States that offer 1000GB for $99 per month, that's a dedicated server in that price too. Sticky me for details.

I don't have any commercial connection with them and I have seen others put their name out on this board.

If you really want to go nuts then they do 10mbps and 100mbps dedicated servers which range from $199 to $1999 a month. The $199 10mbps ones seem to be always out of stock but I'd imagine a call might get you one.

A 100mbps running at 80% all of the time represents 26 terrabytes of data flying out of your box, but you only get a 80GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM!

[chopin2256]

How old is your domain, out of curiosity?

[u4eas]

Thanks for the help =)

My domain is about 1 month old.

[moltar]

Is it all viral marketing? Just have a look at other similar sites and see what ads they utilize.

You can also make it a subscription based service. For example, you can offer 20 flash movies for free and then if someone wants more, then he/she has to pay a fee. In that case you need to be really dedicated and update often to keep the paid users interested.

Or make another website on a different but similar topic, that will bring money and advertise it on your first site.