YouTubers vs Webmasters

Webmasters we are alone

[skynet84]

Youtubers = No Cost Management, No affected by AdBlock on mobile App
Webmaster= Dedicated Hosting 1000$/Year SSL certificate 70$ Year Premium plugins 50-60$ year Premium Theme: 70$ year Others services like CDN, website uptime monitoring, sitelock and similar / 800$ year. Affected by AdBlock.

Professional Youtubers pay = 0$ Every year (management cost) No affected by AdBlock on mobile App
Professional Webmasters pay = 2000$+ Every year (management cost). Always affected by AdBlock

Quick Facts:
615 million devices now use adblock
(Last Report by PageFire) [pagefair.com...]

Will Adsense do something in the future for help "Honest" publisher to grow? Every year i got new visitor + i buy new dedicated hosting (more money by my side) but -minus adsense income. Really Frustrating. Any advice?

[ember]

Webmaster= Dedicated Hosting 1000$/Year SSL certificate 70$ Year Premium plugins 50-60$ year Premium Theme: 70$ year Others services like CDN, website uptime monitoring, sitelock and similar / 800$ year.

I spend $60 a year on hosting and $12 a year per domain. That's it.

[skynet84]

i got 15.000+ visitors a day, i want ssl certification and speed website for offer a nice "user experience". no shared hosting offer 15000+ visitors a day with 60$. If you spend 60$ you are not professional trust me.

[ember]

If you spend 60$ you are not professional trust me.

Hmmm...I don't get 15,000 visitors a day, but I earn enough to support myself in the manner to which I have become accustomed and have since 2003. Not sure, but that might qualify as professional. I've also been invited to Google for dinner. Have you?

[skynet84]

Yes, i have been extented several invitations over the past years.

[Dimitri]

>> Any advice? <<

To become a YouTuber? At Twitter, you can make again more money, and totally free, just post random tweets, gain followers, then you'll be able to post sponsored tweets, costs $0 , you don't even need a camera, light or microphone.

Joke aside, you don't need $2000 / year to run a site. I have 50.000 visitors / day (+ robots) on a dedicated server at $56 / mo ( E3-1245 V2 / 32 GB / 3 x 120 GB SSD / Unimited bandwidth @ 250Mbps ), if you don't have an e-commerce site, you can get a free SSL ( at "Let's encrypt" for example), I've developed my own CMS , doing my own page layout and graphics. You can also be white listed by Adblock plus (you seve your text ads to ABP users, normal ads to everybody else, and if your ads are not loading, you can load affiliate ads instead, etc...)

[edited by: Dimitri at 9:48 pm (utc) on Feb 1, 2017]

[skynet84]

I aim for quality and quality costs. I know what I am talking about.

[ember]

A lot of us in here know what we are talking about. My point is there are always more than one way to do things. You can do it your way and be successful, and I can do it my way and be successful. Just please do not call me unprofessional because my way is different from yours.

[skynet84]

@ember You are assuming that if I pay more then others to maintain my website and a certain user experience, I'm the one that doesn't know how to do things right. But while you are telling me to focus on how to reduce my costs, which will not work for me, and hinting that you know better because you were invited to Google for dinner, which is good for you, but nonetheless does not make me your inferior, you are missing my point: youtubers don't have management costs like webmasters and they get more support in the sense that they are not that affected by Adblock mobile app for example. What is your take on this very real issue affecting a great deal of webmasters? I am interested in your opinion.

@Dimitri What dedicated hosting are you using? I would like to explore my options.

[Dimitri]

I don't know if this is allowed to mention a host, so I am sending you a PM

[Evan Salamanca]

Become a Tuber and cross market it with your website. I got three videos into doing that with my website during a Kuwait deployment until the curse of Kuwait hit and I broke my phone (a required tool because my site is mobile games).

[Pistoche]

I don't think you really want to hear an opinion, you just want to hear what you want to hear. Google isn't here to babysit you, most of us here are making quite the living off Adsense and that's because we don't unnecessarily spend money where it isn't needed. If you feel like you have to do that, then maybe publishing/e-commerce isn't for you.

And if you think YouTube is better and gets more perks, then use that to earn an income, just stop whining.

[tangor]

The OP needs to deal with ad blockers, not youtube. Youtube has nothing to do with ads being blocked.

With the bankroll suggested, it should be pretty simple to contact the ad block folks and get your site white listed in their software.

YOUTUBE has nothing to do with blocked ads.

Aside: with that kind of bankroll, adsense is chump change, should be doing direct advertising. Better results and larger revenues involved. Been there, done that, and on sites that average 12 to 120 hits per day. (Aside 2: different biz where the product(s) are large five and six figures each and 10 sales a year make the nut.)

[graeme_p]

One problem here is that "webmaster" is being defined as "running your own website that makes money only from adsense". There are far more ways of making money from websites than that - not one of my clients has adsense on their sites.

Another is that is assumes you can produce any kind of content. I can write well (a lot better than I do when writing forum posts) but I do not have the skills to produce good quality video.

It looks as though Skynet is running an unusual site (all video content served off his own server?) using an off the shelf platform (wordpress?) which is going to be horribly inefficient.

[anefarious1]

You have got to be kidding me. For many webmasters, hosting and domain renewal costs are well under 1% of revenue. Imagine telling your sob story to a brick and mortar shop owner? lol

[lucy24]

What's the premise here-- that you can make more money producing YouTube videos than by running a website, and something ought to be done about it? That's like saying you can make more money as a hooker than by working a cash register at Walmart.

Well, OK, it's not exactly like that, but in the realm of apples-and-oranges, yeah, it's the same kind of comparison.

Shrug.

[romerome]

Just looking through numbers. So all the expenses you have are $1930 a year. So lets go with the $2000 number to round it off.

You have 15k visitors a day. I don't know how many pageviews. Lets assume 20k (I assume its more but I don't know the site). That comes out to about 7.3 million page views a year.

With that many page views your $2000 in expenses should be a small percentage of your revenue.

You should only be breaking even if your page RPM is around 0.27 .

If your RPM is around 4.00 then your expenses would be around 6.9% of your income. So increasing your RPM/traffic should be the best area to grow income.

I am not saying lower your site experience by loading it up with random ads. I would remove ads performing poorly and find better ones.

I have run larger sites with a smaller hosting bill. But again I don't think that is what I would concentrate on if I was you. Even if you magically eliminated all your expenses you are not substantially increasing your profit. I would be looking into ways to increase pageviews and RPM.

[frankleeceo]

I think as webmasters we have great deal more control over the business over youtubers.

We can serve a great deal more ads, run affiliates, and build email list.

Youtubers are at the mercy of the boss, their entire followers can be gone in an instant. If the youtube algo changes, they're gone too.

I personally would not build my business solely on YouTube. It's long term suicide. Any sensible YouTubers eventually build out and extend their business with the popularity that they have gained.

The ones that do not...fade into shadows and disappear once their fame is over.

In terms of website costs, I manage my fixed costs to roughly 10% of revenue. 2 years ago when my income dropped, the first thing I did was to downgrade my services and look for different places to save on hosting and domain.

If you are spending that much on hosting over 15k visitors daily, it may pay off to figure out ways to lower your cost, make site more efficient by using cache, remove unneeded plugin, etc. Think long term, what if you are serving 150k visitors daily, will you have to spend 20k or higher per year on hosting? Will you make money?

Learn how to lower costs is part of the webmastering business.

Quality is very important, but managing cost for a healthier profit is essential for long term growth.

ps on the google invite...What yearly ad revenue is needed to get that? $100k? $200k? $300k? o.o? Something that I can strive for haha.

[Marshall]

I think the OP is dealing more with people making money for free versus those making it via an investment. I understand the point: why should someone doing something for free (YouTube) be able to earn presumably more money than those who invest time and money into a website REGARDLESS of the amount of the investment. @skynet84, welcome to the real world. I am not trying to be trite or belittling, but that is just the way it is.

[topr8]

i think marshall is correct, i feel that is exactly the point the OP meant.

i'd just add as others have said that part of the problem with youtube is that they control the whole system, they also either own or own the rights to your content. i believe that in the long term you can't develop a proper brand through a third party, it's like selling on ebay or amazon ... buyers don't go to you, they go to ebay/amazon/etsy or whatever other platform you are on.

[phranque]

combining the last two posts into one pithy statement:
if the service is free, you are the product.

[Edge]

I spend $60 a year on hosting and $12 a year per domain. That's it.

Right.... no traffic. somewhere around 500,000 uniques monthly you'll get a real server...

[graeme_p]

Right.... no traffic. somewhere around 500,000 uniques monthly you'll get a real server...

I have managed to serve about 350k a month on shared hosting that was not much more expensive.

A $10 or $15 a month VPS should handle it comfortably unless you site is really heavy.