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A year ago I developed an universal video downloader site http://savedeo.com http://savedeo.com. I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked t
by doh 12y ago
A year ago I developed an universal video downloader site http://savedeo.com http://savedeo.com.
I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but people liked the site and kept coming back. Year later the site generates around $30k a month and the operation costs are around $90 (close to nothing).
The site is very lightweight as it doesn't really downloads anything. It just extracts direct links to the files.
There are a great challenges that I have to deal with (like YouTube blocking IPs, sites changing designs all the time, etc.).
- zuck9 12y agoDo you bother with a day job now?
- doh 12y agoI actually do. My main thing is http://pexe.so http://pexe.so
- eob 12y agoThat's pretty awesome. I just tried it out to see how you make money and noticed that you have both banner ads and also open popup-tabs. Are you comfortable sharing how much of the revenue is from the banners versus the popups? Are those the only two streams?
- doh 12y agoThere are no banners only pop-up ads. There are two different providers, one generating around 1/3 the other the rest. I get probably one inquiry a week to test new ad system, which I mostly do. This way I went up from 6-7k a month to beyond 30k.
- redfalcon6 12y agoAwesome! Any recommendations on what pop-up / interstitial providers to use? I have a small site which has free, useful file downloads, and these could work well on that as an additional revenue stream. I have Adsense on there now but it is only pumping out $200-300/Month off of 10K+ visitors.
- corobo 12y agoAny thoughts towards allowing people to promote their videos to that top list you've got there on the homepage? I'm er.. asking for a friend!
- doh 12y agoI actually spent a decent amount of time preventing people from promoting their videos on the homepage. The traffic dropped a bit afterwards but I like to have a real data there, just for the curiosity.
- corobo 12y agoFair enough, I was more thinking similar to how Google searches do it, a sort of yellow-backed "Promoted" link as an alternate/additional source of income than artificially bumping something to the top through fake downloads
- doh 12y agoWell, the top videos get barely over couple of 1k views so I don't know how valuable it is. I am extremely strict with what I count as a hit (I have a whole GEOip & browser combination) so if two people come from the same country with the same browser, it's only one hit, ever.
- razius 12y agoHow are you generating revenue? I don't see any ads.
- poopsintub 12y agoClicking around pops-up ads in a new window.
- doh 12y agohttp://oi60.tinypic.com/29c71q1.jpg http://oi60.tinypic.com/29c71q1.jpg
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- corobo 12y agoDisable popup blocker and click one of the download links - it opens up the download link [I assume to convince you to disable popup blocker] and (for me on this attempt) a bet365 advert in popups
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- Cyph0n 12y agoImpressive work man.
- ccleve 12y agoHow does savedeo.com actually make money? It isn't obvious.
- doh 12y agoThere are pop-up ads whenever you click somewhere. It's crazy intrusive, but unfortunately google like services are generating barely 1/3.
- deanclatworthy 12y agoMind sharing your provider's name (email is in my profile)? I have a hosted service, in a different space, with a similar demographic. Adsense banned my account (mistakenly may I add) over a year ago and now I'm out of monetisation ideas.
- doh 12y agoThe smaller one is http://www.gunggo.com http://www.gunggo.com, the bigger one is invitation only.
- dumbfounder 12y agoCan you ask them to invite me? My site Twicsy has over 6 million unique visitors per month but I only make about 1/4 what you make.
- wesbos 12y agoWhen you click on things on the website, they pop open online betting and other affiliate links
- hpagey 12y agoIs it possible to extract audio out of a video file you generate?
- doh 12y agoSure. For that reason I wrote other service, http://auderio.com http://auderio.com ;)
- hpagey 12y agoah i see. I was wondering if its possible to make a configurable autoupdating podcast channel based on these audio files.
- doh 12y agoYou can use the API from http://auderio.com http://auderio.com and do whatever you want
- uberneo 12y agoauderio.com api is through mashape ..which is around 100 request per day .. any way this limit can be increased for hacker accounts ?
- spyder 12y agoThis must be less legal than Savedeo (which only creates a video link), because if the extracted audio is hosted on the servers it's very likely an illegal copy. I'm not sure DMCA would help in this case.
- eli 12y agoThat's not to hard to do on your end, but it would be asking a lot of a free website: they'd have to actually download and pick apart the file.
- stickperson 12y agoAre there any legal implications associated with this site, as in is it legal to download videos from those sites?
- doh 12y agoWell, this is a kind of a gray zone. The data hosted on sites like Youtube don't belong to them but to the creators. The site itself doesn't download anything, in a way it simulates what your browsers does. As a user, that's more complicated. In European Union it's legal. Everywhere else? Hard to say.
- mandeepj 12y ago>The site itself doesn't download anything, in a way it simulates what your browsers does Don't you arrange the download and provide a way for the user to "actually" download the video?
- doh 12y agoThe site gives you a direct link to the file. Based on the site behavior and your browser settings, your browser will or start downloading or open the video directly.
- zeograd 12y agohuge thanks for your story and the transparency of revenue.
- markyc 12y agois most of the income from the nfsw section?
- doh 12y agoActually, the NSFW section is only 0.65% of the site traffic. I think the most income comes from some casinos or this type of ads.
- philipDS 12y agoWhat do you mean income from some casinos? Are casinos downloading videos, or what does that traffic source look like?
- doh 12y agoI mean the pop-up ads are sometimes ads to online casinos, sometimes very popular mobile games, etc. To be honest, I am very frustrated with the ads, but I have to make money somehow and I never found a better way how to do it.
- philipDS 12y agoCool! If you're willing to share, what is the most popular site people download videos for? I was thinking NSFW sites as well, but you said they only account for 0.65%.
- doh 12y agoYoutube (64.08%), Soundcloud (11.37%), Vimeo (9.94%), Mixcloud (3.84%) and then everything else is less than 1%
- meir_yanovich 12y agoHey , can you share which hosting you are using ? and what backend tech you are using ? only high-level. thanks.
- stevenh 12y agoYou're pushing malware via popups. To convert one video, I was subjected to each of these popups three times: http://i.imgur.com/qqK77qp.png http://i.imgur.com/qqK77qp.png http://i.imgur.com/eCAtjOi.png http://i.imgur.com/eCAtjOi.png You're probably paid per install, unless the distribution model for malware has significantly changed in the past six years. Assuming $2 per install, that would mean you're infecting 15,000 machines per month. At bare minimum, this malware you distribute probably maliciously replaces all ads loaded on the infected machine with ads controlled by the hackers who created the malware, and it does this for the remainder of the lifetime of that machine. The legitimate site operators currently obliviously and naively praising you in the comments here are the very same victims who are robbed by the criminals you are colluding with via this ad-replacing malware you distribute. Their CPM and CPC numbers are suffering because of crooks like you. All that aside, none of this takes into account the people who are duped into calling the 1-844 number in those popups who then have their bank accounts cleaned out by the scam artist on the other end who succeeds in socially engineering the victim into sharing their credit card details. What you're doing isn't praiseworthy; it isn't impressive. It's despicable.
- a_bonobo 12y agoThat's weird, I'm not seeing these popups, and Google says the site is OK: https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=savedeo.com https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=savedeo....
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- discardorama 12y agoIf indeed the claim is true (I have not verified it), it is possible that the malware creators don't offer up these popups to Google's bots.
- stevenh 12y agoThe directrev.com malware installation popups I provided screenshots of were triggered by this script embedded in savedeo's post-conversion page: http://cdn.directrev.com/js/gp.min.js?s=S0004793 http://cdn.directrev.com/js/gp.min.js?s=S0004793 Checking that script, we see a lot of "gunggo" references, which is the ad network doh admits to using. Gunggo apparently owns directrev.com, and both are considered pretty shady from what I can gather: https://nodpi.org/forum/index.php/topic,5379.0.html https://nodpi.org/forum/index.php/topic,5379.0.html Savedeo.com is ranked 49,679 on alexa. I'm guessing it gets around 9,000 visitors per day. With such little traffic, and no legitimate product or paid services being offered, there is absolutely no remaining way to earn 30k per month other than to spray hapless visitors with the most aggressive/malicious advertisements known to man. Here are the stats from his ad network which he showed off earlier: http://i.imgur.com/LfgWL7D.png http://i.imgur.com/LfgWL7D.png I'm assuming those numbers are ad impression counts. There is no possible way savedeo.com is receiving anything close to that many page views per day. If it were, his alexa rank would be closer to 1,800; certainly not 49,679. I run a site approaching the alexa 2000 range, and it only gets half as much traffic as his ad network statistics screenshot boasts. Since the numbers in this ad network screenshot cannot possibly represent savedeo.com's traffic, we are left to guess what they actually do represent. Here's my guess: It's the number of ads served to infected machines per day via the malware he helped install through popups like these. Assuming he's infected 25,000 machines, each infected device would only need to maliciously replace 20 legitimate advertisements on victim sites per day for him to reach this absurdly high impression count. If that is indeed what is happening, he's earning roughly $1.50 per thousand ad impressions which is fairly standard.
- raphinou 12y agoHow did you get those visitors in what i see as a crowded market? That's always been my problem....
- doh 12y agoNever did anything special. After a month got promoted by Lifehacker which crashed the site so the traffic went back to the original. Everything is WOM.
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- brandon272 12y agoIt seems like there are hundreds (or thousands) of other sites that do the same thing. What do you feel separates yours from the others?
- doh 12y agoSpeed and simplicity of the design. You can for instance download a whole playlist of videos at once and get a .m3u file that includes all the direct links to the top quality videos.
- RealGeek 12y agoHow many visitors do you get on the website?
- groktor 12y agoWould you mind sharing your traffic numbers? Daily page impressions & unique visitors would be interesting...
- usamec 12y agoYou are using worst kinds of ads on the internet. And the only thing which my chrome blocks is actually the link to video.
- tryx 12y agoI was wondering if you can point to me where and how you can get information of how to extract/download audio/video files.