Entries tagged " ahcabron "  

Monetizing Adult Websites

I normally don't like to write about the sites I use to generate income but I have blogged about this before. I co-own the NSFW website AhCabron.com. The basic idea is that users upload their photos so others can comment and vote on them. Most of the work that I need to do on this site is just help approve the uploads. We try our best to make sure that the uploaded photos are not obviously copyrighted, etc. and the users take it from there.

Adult sites that are free to use are usually more difficult to monetize. A good chunk of the users will be 14-18 year old boys who have no credit card and rarely click ads. The only form of monetization we currently use is text ads via BlackLabelAds (or AdBrite) and some affiliate banner ads.

In the past we were working hard doing direct deals with advertisers. That made much more money than just text ads do, but was a lot more work. We didn't feel the return was worth the effort, so we slowly phased that out and went back to text ads.

We also do ZERO advertising. All our traffic is, and always has been, referral traffic. Some how word got out about it and people starting flooding in and bringing a friend with them. So much so that we had to buy a second server to split the load.

With all this traffic success, I still haven't figured out how to turn that traffic into real money. We are averaging 250K page views per day, but our checks every month are very low compared to our traffic. I have a few ideas I want to try to up the websites income but I have been thinking...

How do I successfully monetize a "free to users" adult website? I am hoping someone out there in the blogosphere will have some experience in this area and send me a tip. Any takers?

Technorati Tags: adult websites, ahcabron, make money online, advertising

AhCabron.com - Now Powered By Django!

AhCabron is a very NSFW website that I have worked on and off on for years. The name "Ah Cabron" (spanish) basically translates into "You Ass!". I know the owner and am more than happy to help him out when I can. I have helped with engineering and development in the past and am sort of the "go to guy" when technical issues arise. Certainly I present a bill for my services; after all... we are not Communists. <insert laughter here> (Sorry, Godfather moment..)

Little history... The site started so people can upload images of their boyfriends/girlfriends and get feedback on their looks. It was originally run using the open source coppermine gallery software. It quickly turned into people uploading adult natured images and soon it was 99% adult only content being submitted. Not one to turn away perfectly good images, the owner kept up with it.

Soon he realized that coppermine was too limited for the changes he wanted to make. That's when I entered the picture. I originally wrote a brand new system from scratch using Python and Mod Python. It was a basic system using the mod_python.publisher, mod_python.psp system for templates and my own sql wrapper for database access. For about 2 years this software has been running the site and doing a great job. It has been a bit of a hit, as it pulls in over 8M page views per month which is respectable traffic.

The time had come how ever to take the site to the next level. For that, I knew I had to rebuild this thing from scratch. Since I am now a Django groupie, I of course rebuilt the software using it. In all I would say it took me about 13 hours total to rebuild this site or about 2 weeks giving time when I had it. Most of those 13 hours was spent writing data migration scripts from the old schema to the new Django model schema. With heavy use of generic views the site was put together extremely fast. I should mention that a lot of the back end code I reused from other projects I have worked on (ex: image processing, watermarks, Amazon S3 integration, etc).

As of now the new code is basically a replication of the old site. All the old features are there and I wanted to cut that over now and flush out any bugs before I continue with the list of new features that are coming down the pipe. Video, RSS Feeds on just about anything, full user profiles and slide shows are just a few of the features on my ToDo list.

Check out the site, and pass me some feedback!

Technorati Tags: ahcabron, development, django, nsfw, python