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Not sure if it qualifies, as I actually managed to make money for a few months, but: MyGuestmap (now long dead) - started it in 2007, put Google Ads and some do
by herval 9y ago
Not sure if it qualifies, as I actually managed to make money for a few months, but: MyGuestmap (now long dead) - started it in 2007, put Google Ads and some donation button. It allowed people to create their own little maps and embed them on blogs, where people could place pins and say something.
Got to 40k maps in a few months (it somehow got viral in a forum, then went from there). I even made $1k in ads one month. Some of the users included indie artists, setting up maps for fans, and diverse groups of people (there was a map for "moms of kids with cancer", for instance, which is pretty cool)
Then Google banned me for serving ads in porn sites. Then Paypal banned me (and took my funds) for taking money from shady accounts. Then my hosting service asked me to leave because they found "adult pics" on my site. A quick audit on the profile pics revealed that there were quite a few maps with porn content (including all the illegal stuff). I took stuff down as fast as I could, but never managed to get Google to pay me again. Tried my luck with a few redesigns, setting up a new adsense account (got shutdown immediately), etc. In the end, I let the domain expire and that was that. At least I didn't spend a lot of time or money on it...
Ouch.
Edit: registrar > hosting service
- ValentineC 9y ago> Then my registrar asked me to leave because they found "adult pics" on my site. Your domain registrar? Would any of them do this?
- herval 9y agoSorry, I meant hosting. In hindsight, the domain was actually my best asset (it’s a PR 4 domain), so I should’ve kept that :( )
- newzzy 9y agowhat was the name?
- lloydde 9y agoA google search of "myguestmap" finds articles which match the story and suggests the domain was likely http://myguestmap.lorca.eti.br/index.jsp http://myguestmap.lorca.eti.br/index.jsp
- herval 9y agoThat was the first test box, in a friend’s personal site :) actual domain was lame: mapservices.org I got kicked out of dreamhosting, then kept it alive on railsplayground for years (but w/o the ads/donations) Additional curiosity tidbit: I made that product to learn Ruby on Rails - the v0 was a Java Struts/JSP, so I rewrote it as an exercise and “launched” on mine & my friends personal blogs. The internet felt a lot more viral back then, at least to me (we ended up launching two other side projects that actually got some traction too, but could never focus on or monetize)
- monknomo 9y agoI know it's a rule; if a user can add content, someone will add porn, but why add porn to maps? Were people putting a pin in and commenting with a naughty pic? What does that mean?
- herval 9y agoThere were entire groups of people using it for “dating”, uploading nude photos, etc (you could upload a single photo along with your pin). I also found at least one bestiality-oriented group, with “meetups”, so... there was that. :-|
- byoung2 9y agoIf you had the stomach for it, it would be interesting to just make it a map service for adult content. There are ad networks and billing providers that specialize in this sort of thing, and AWS allows porn (legal, that is).
- OJFord 9y ago> (legal, that is) Is any major platform more restrictive than the regional law?
- byoung2 9y agoWhen I checked cloud providers' terms to see if we could build a crawling infrastrucutre for my last company, I noticed Rackspace did not allow adult content of any kind, but thst may have changed since 2011.
- herval 9y agoYeah, I didn’t, really (specially with all the gray and flatout illegal areas). There are providers now too (although a friend that does it tells me hosting is still impossible) - not sure about back then