4 ms·

I started a ROM site when I was 14, it eventually got really popular and thus got quite a few youtube videos and good search engine rankings. These days the ROM

I started a ROM site when I was 14, it eventually got really popular and thus got quite a few youtube videos and good search engine rankings. These days the ROMs have been long removed so traffic has obviously fallen, however due to the links and still decent search engine rankings it gets roughly 100k page views per day. End result is that the ads give me around $2k to $3k a month. Pretty happy with that since I no longer work on it and it's basically just rotting away.

danielfernandez 15y ago
Are you using Google Adsense?
- mfjordvald 15y ago
  I did in the early days, but they eventually banned me. (still paid what they owed me, though) I hear from a friend still doing this that adsense is pretty bad these days. More graphic ads convert better and pay more. So ad agencies like Matomy(Xtend), CPX (basically any yieldmanager platform) performs a bit better. Of course, if you can get into platforms such as Tribal fusion then you'll make a killing as they have really high paying ads.
getsat 15y ago
Wow. Why not move the domain to an anonymous registrar (or 301 all the traffic to a new one), host the site on offshore bulletproof hosting, and put the roms back? That's a huge chunk of change you're probably missing out on.
- mfjordvald 15y ago
  Too be honest because it felt wrong to run such a site and know you were a huge part of the piracy problem. But yes, I basically decided that I didn't want $20,000 a month. At the height of its time it served 2 million page views a day! These days I'm just thankful for everything it taught me, I can safely say that my programming skill comes from this one website and the trial by fire that is to scale a website to such high traffic and bandwidth usage.
  - getsat 15y ago
    Yeah, the first time you take a site from nothing to large scale is awesome. :)
  - etherael 15y ago
    Would it still feel wrong if you geared it specifically to abandonware roms? Perhaps something to consider.

danielfernandez 15y ago

Are you using Google Adsense?

mfjordvald 15y ago
I did in the early days, but they eventually banned me. (still paid what they owed me, though) I hear from a friend still doing this that adsense is pretty bad these days. More graphic ads convert better and pay more. So ad agencies like Matomy(Xtend), CPX (basically any yieldmanager platform) performs a bit better. Of course, if you can get into platforms such as Tribal fusion then you'll make a killing as they have really high paying ads.

getsat 15y ago

Wow. Why not move the domain to an anonymous registrar (or 301 all the traffic to a new one), host the site on offshore bulletproof hosting, and put the roms back? That's a huge chunk of change you're probably missing out on.

mfjordvald 15y ago
Too be honest because it felt wrong to run such a site and know you were a huge part of the piracy problem. But yes, I basically decided that I didn't want $20,000 a month. At the height of its time it served 2 million page views a day! These days I'm just thankful for everything it taught me, I can safely say that my programming skill comes from this one website and the trial by fire that is to scale a website to such high traffic and bandwidth usage.
- getsat 15y ago
  Yeah, the first time you take a site from nothing to large scale is awesome. :)
- etherael 15y ago
  Would it still feel wrong if you geared it specifically to abandonware roms? Perhaps something to consider.