Working with traffic has unlimited possibilities not only in terms of niche, pricing types, and advertising formats. It is also variable in how much resource such work can take. One of our publishers has proven in practice that you can have such employment as an additional one and still earn enough to not lose interest in it. Meet a successful businessman who spends very little effort and time on his movie websites monetization, but is happy with his results — and we are very happy with him!
The websites
I have 2 websites.Both websites have a user-friendly interface. You can watch from various servers or download files from free hosting sites.
One has 251K users this year till today, 287K users last year according to google analytics.
Second one is a newly launched this year but has been a massive success with 887k users till now.
How did it start
When covid-19 hit the world, me and my friends from my country decided to work on a movie site, because my friends are movie freaks and they have a community on Facebook. They told me to make a website where we can stream movies and series and we will run the website on a subscription basis.At first, I thought to run the website via automated script based which grave the streaming link from 3rd party apps. But i though since we are free due to lockdown, I can host files on own server and file will be safe. So we, a team of six member, has started the website and named it flixsix. For the first 3 months we downloaded, renamed, uploaded, and posted the movies and series. Then 4 members left due to their job and there was just 1 member left, except me. But he couldn’t work due to personal problems. So I just downloaded, uploaded, and posted the movie while watching them to pass the time on lockdown.
While team members left, most of the subscribers left due to marketing strategy. So I was searching for alternative income way. Then I placed ads on the site. Over 1 year I observed that overall CPM was too low. So I searched for an ad site and found Adsterra.
2012/09/08 was the day I started with Adsterra, but I was not sure yet if it was best or not. So I used other ad networks sometimes, sometimes Adsterra again, and sometimes another one. Whenever I found a legit and well-known ad network, I was giving it a try. Even this year, I tried 2 ad networks for 2-3 months. But after using so many ad networks, I found that Adsterra only (except AdSense, which is far different for such a niche) is suitable and best for me due to good CPM and easy payment processing.
About the formats
Popunder is my first choice to generate revenue and keep the user interface clean. Social Bar and Native banners are also profitable.I have tested VAST ads on pre-play and mid-play but I was totally disappointed, so no current support for VAST is no problem for me.
General statistics
In the 1st year I was dependent on subscribers, so I was able to manage the cost of the site and servers. But when I depend on ads, I have to be more careful on cost management. I had 2 dedicated servers of 2tb each, costing 10$ monthly. There were 50-70 subscribers who pay 1$ per month. But when my team members left, it became 5-10. So I switched to cheap storage vps which cost me yearly almost 100$ for 2 vps of 2tb each. So I saved almost 140$ here.Then I didn't update the content for almost 1.5 years due to personal work. But I saw there was $107.313 in the year 2022. In the middle of 2023, I started back again alone, just updating new movies and series. I got $547.058 at the end of the year, and I got $437.965 in 2024 till today.
My users are mostly from India, Bangladesh and other Tier-3 lowest CPM countries. That’s why I focused on Indian and Bangladeshi Movies-series. That's why my income may seem low at an average of 0.04$ CPM. If you try Hollywood or a similar industry, you will get much more money.
Now my websites do an on-page SEO. I never do other SEO because I don't know about SEO enough and I don't have that much time to do SEO. But I got almost all the visitors from Google search, so that’s a simple proof that if you do just some extra SEO, you might be much luckier than me.
Services and sources
There are few, as I didn’t use any service or do much SEO. My website is Wordpress-based, and the content is very friendly. So, I got almost 99% traffic from Google, which takes time just because of my lack of knowledge. If you have the resources to dive deeper into this topic, you’ll definitely make your optimization process easier.Movie websites tips and specifics
Beginners should be patient. Try to host your files on your own server. It might be time-consuming work, but it will be great if you watermark your content. I bought a Linux VDS with a high-performance CPU to watermark files. I also wrote a PHP script to do watermarking with FFmpeg.If your home internet is slow, buy a remote desktop with at least a 1 Gbps up-down connection. Use that RDP to download and upload files. I also suggest you use some free video hosting websites that pay for watching and downloading videos so you can provide download links to users and earn extra money.
Try to use a reliable, cheap storage VPS instead of a dedicated server, which cuts down your cost by more than half. Before hosting files on your VPS, try to know how they handle complaints to minimize the risk of server suspension. Never be late on such a complaint to delete the alleged file. Try to keep the content clean and easy for the user to watch or download.
My plans for further work with Adsterra
I have plans to work on new niches. I plan to start a knowledge-based blog site and a user content-based website. So Adsterra will be my first choice to survive the cost. But there are always ways for improvement, so I’d suggest Adsterra focus on getting VAST advertisers. I found no easy ad network supporting such movie series streaming sites to monetize. It will be much more profitable if VAST ads have CPM similar to Popads, Native banners, or Social Bar.
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