Running a web proxy: Success or just work for nothing?
Author: Olaf LedererYou visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?
As long as community sites like Myspace or friendster are blocked by firewalls in schools, universities and corporate environments there is a chance for the web proxy business. There are a lot of web proxy related services which makes this business also attractive for people with limited webmaster skills. Beside proxy hosting there is submission services and a range of proxy advertising services.
Topsite submission services
It looks like proxies and topsites make a good team, I know of at least two topsites with a moderate amount of outgoing traffic to their listed member sites. This is of course why such service exists: Just submit your site to several topsites paste the button code into your footer and you’re done. The submission service providers use various scripts to post your site to a number of topsites. My experience is that a lot of these submissions are nearly always useless because the topsites they submit to are often down or not popular.
Conclusion:
Using topsites for proxy related traffic is fine, but select them by yourself carefully and use only those sites where the top user is ranked based on inbound traffic rather then button impressions. Check the topsites where your sites are listed frequently and also check to see if you are seeing visitors from these sites.
Proxy building services
If you don’t know how to setup a proxy or you are just to busy you could use some help. There are a few kids offering a proxy setup service. You get a Phproxy powered proxy website incl. you own adsense code and maybe other ad code inside the proxified pages. The design is most of the time a free template with the requirement of one or more backlink(s). This kind of service provider is often not a professional web designer/developer. These people are using some pre-configured scripts where the knowledge of PHP code is not needed.
Conclusion:
Use them if you need it because of missing knowledge, but don’t forget that the configuration is very basic and there might be hundreds other proxy websites with exact the same content. Because the bandwidth is not cheap you need to be aware that this basic/unfiltered configuration can be very expensive as your bandwidth will be eaten up quickly by users with little or no return.
Proxy websites/script sales
There are a lot proxy websites for sales every day, some of them are new and some of them have traffic and earnings history. Proxy websites are a very common offer, but sometimes there are also other proxy ideas for sale like proxy list scripts which can go for almost $200 or modified proxy scripts with additional functionality. Proxies do not sell for the amount they use to but you still need to be careful of any high priced proxy sale. If you are considering buying an established proxy website with good traffic and earnings you need to confirm its current traffic, don’t buy a site because of the traffic it had in the past. Domains often get placed on Blacklists which are used by a lot of schools and often a proxy owner will be keen to sell if he see’s a dip in traffic. Starting a new proxy website is more work but you have much better chances to have success at least in the short to mid term.
Driving Proxy traffic
I mentioned before that there are topsites which could be a good traffic source. The bad thing is that there are only a few of them. A lot of proxy topsites are full of cheating members or spammed by not related websites. There are also several proxy lists, submitting your site to these lists is free. They offer also paid top or bolded listings. Think about how much traffic you need, the maximum return for the traffic and the cost of advertising.
About the Author:
Olaf Lederer is the owner of several web development related websites, one of which is finalwebsites.com which hosts several popular PHP Classes. He also knows a thing or two about web proxies.
Would you like to be a Payment Blogger guest author then get in touch!
Tim Nash
2007-09-06 15:01:49
Thanks Olaf there are some great tid bits in there so do you think proxies will survive also what sort of advertisement do you use to generate income from them?
Johnty
from SEO Forensics2007-09-06 15:05:26
How much money can you make with a proxy? I mean its got to fluctate as most of the users are kids in school so when school out do proxies just die?
Also you mention bad lists what do you do when your proxy is added to a list other then sell it of course!
Olaf Lederer
from PHP rules!2007-09-06 15:15:51
Hi Johnty,
this was my first “Proxy summer” this year and I thought 3 month ago while everyone was selling his proxies: “Oeps what to do…”
Actually I made less during the school vacations but it was OK. I think if your costs are very high (expensive server) you have a problem.
I think you’re talking about topsites… just remove the button from your site and the listing will expire within a few weeks
Tim Nash
2007-09-06 15:26:53
I think Johnty meant if your site is black listed by corporate firewall logs what can you do other then sell it.
Johnty
from SEO Forensics2007-09-06 15:28:04
yep, can you get round the blocks or is just a case of shut up shop and start again, also do the main firewalls use just 1 list or are there several?
Olaf Lederer
from PHP rules!2007-09-06 15:36:04
lol… don’t tell, I use the same site with a new domain. This way you have to change only a few things and it’s rock’n roll again (I did that with a site which was banned from Google. The same site is at the moment one of my best earner)
My first proxy is one year old and still makes ~$50 a month.
Tim Nash
2007-09-06 15:51:33
Hehe makes sense google and presumably the firewall black lists just block domains and not IPs, why we’re you banned Olaf
Olaf Lederer
from PHP rules!2007-09-06 15:56:30
I got banned because of my hotlink protection (forgot to whitelist Google)
admin
from Webdigity webmaster forums2007-10-01 22:35:29
Proxies still is a profitable business but it still has a lot of troubles. Personally I stoped spending my time with that model after I sold my first - and biggest one - proxy.
In my opinion - if you overcome the server problems - you only need to find the sources of traffic, create a few myspace accounts to promote them, and then every time your proxy is blacklisted you can easily establish a new one.