5 Ways To Make Money From A Proxy Website
November 13th, 2007At first glance it may seem like making money off of a proxy website is easy business. After all, they’re very popular and fairly easy to start driving traffic to – and you can get lots of that in a hurry, if you use the right techniques. But anyone with a little experience knows that proxy sites are notoriously hard to monetize. Why is this?
- Advertising restrictions placed on proxy sites
- Horrible CTR from users
- You are competing with the site that you are serving for your user’s attention
- Small space to place advertisements on
Add this on top of the fact that a successful proxy site quickly requires a powerful and expensive hosting package and now you have the reason why most webmasters who set out to make money from such a site fail. However, in this article I am going to discuss 5 techniques that will help you turn the tables and make a profit from your proxy website.
1. Pop-unders / Pop-ups
Pop-ups used to be the huge new thing a while back, until the internet was flooded with them. Then came pop-unders, a modification of the successful pop-up. People were seeing CPMs of $3-5, which is huge. But then came pop-up blockers, and the war began. Nowadays, pop-ups and pop-unders are not in such proliferation, but if used properly they can still be an effective source of income. Find the companies which have been developing advanced pop-up/under technology that beat the latest blockers and implement them into your proxy website. Don’t overdue it, however. Test out different strategies on how to serve them and how often to serve them, and see what works.
2. Interstitials
Interstitials are the ‘new pop-up’ to say – most advertiser’s response to pop-up blockers. These are ads that load between pages – you’ve probably run into them from time to time. A user will click a link to go to another page on a website and be taken to a transition page that will automatically redirect the user to their target page in 5 – 10 seconds, but in the meantime displays them a full-page ad. These types of ads typically have higher CTR since they grab the user’s full attention. Try incorporating interstitials into your proxy site – for example, having one display for every 20 pages a user visits through your proxy.
3. Adsense
Using Adsense on a proxy website is hit or miss – it may work for you, it may not. You’ll have to try it out and see what your results are. I contacted Google a while ago to ask about using Adsense on a proxy website and they said that as long as the code is on your page (not somehow tacked on, or making it seem like it is part of, the page that you are serving through your proxy) then it is fine.
Most proxies keep a “bar” running across the top of the page that reminds the user which proxy they are using and links back to their homepage, etc., and place their ad there – however, this is unlikely to be effective because of “banner blindness” that users have nowadays, so try something different. Maybe implement Adsense like an interstitial – every so often between pages the user will be displayed a transition page that has some text (“Thank you for using myProxy – blah blah blah. You will be redirected to [page] in 10 seconds. In the meantime, take a moment to look at our sponsors.” or something to your liking) and then displays an Adsense box. This is much more likely to be effective because it captures the user’s attention by placing the ad block front and center.
Some people write Adsense off as something that is no longer as effective as it used to be – this is false, you just have to be more creative in your implementation of it. You can still make nice money if you know how to work it. Test things out, record your results, and modify appropriately.
4. Affiliate Offers
Affiliate marketing is becoming bigger and bigger with tons of money to be made off of it. Find products/offers through companies like Copeac and AzoogleAds and then use the techniques described above to sell them – display the offers and salestext in interstitials or pop-ups/unders. After a little experimenting you should find out which type of offers have the highest success rate, so stick to those. The possibilities with affiliate marketing is endless, so keep an open mind and try everything! Remember that you can’t just place a link to the offer and expect people to buy it – you have to presell it first. Read about successful landing pages and incorporate those techniques into your interstitials.
5. CPM
If you have enough traffic you can still make decent money off of CPM, even if it is only a single banner ad. Try placing a standard banner in your proxy info bar at the top of the page and see what your results are. Because proxy traffic is not generally high-quality traffic you may not get into the bigger name (and higher paying) CPM companies like TribalFusion, FastClick, or Burst!, but you will be sure to get into at least a couple of the lower quality ones. Let’s say that you only earn $0.30 CPM, but you are serving 300,000 pages a day – divide that by 1000 and you have 300. 300 x 0.30 is 90, so you would be earning $90/day – wow!
While proxy sites are hard to make a profit off of, I have showed you 5 techniques that will help you do just that. The most important thing to remember is to keep trying different techniques and see what works best for your site. Be creative – you’d be surprised at what might work!








