Proxies

10 thousand pageviews and only 10 cents

How to Properly Monetize a Proxy

For this post we’re going to assume you know how to build and market a proxy So we can get right into How to monetize a proxy. Proxies are unique in that with very little work and marketing they not only have a front page that gets a lot of unique traffic but also a backend that gets forum like page views. So to properly monetize a proxy one has to take advantage of the large amount of unique traffic as well as all the users that look past the front page ads and actually uses the proxy and return every day to use it.

First, Monetizing the front page. Front page ads are designed primarily for first time visitors as second timers are going to skip the ads and go straight to the url bar. Now, this really is simple as Google does currently allow Adsense on the front page of proxies, so depending on the theme of your proxy site create text ads that look like they are simply listings for other proxies. Place these ads above the url bar so the users has to glance at them as the read down the page. Now if you have a place on your site for an ad on the side or below the url bar, I have found banner only works best for this as it will attract the eye straight off and if they like it they’ll click and if they dont they’ll return to the top of the site and read down towards the url. You should always experiment with different types of ads because Adsense may not work best for your particular user group. Also Ive found ads like Auctionads or certain affiliates where the product being sold is actually useful, does increase your clicks. The nature of the ad promotes users to click them even though they know its an ad kinda how people read catalogs even though its one big ad because they like the products.

Now on to the part of a proxy that will make or break you, the proxified pages. Even if you have all the safeguards to keep bandwidth to a minimum, thousands of unique users a day could break your server or force you to upgrade to a server you cant afford just to handle the crazy amount of traffic. The problem though is that 96% of the server requests don’t come from the heavily monetized front page. They come from the proxified pages where a lot of proxy owners don’t even monetize. The proxified pages aren’t as copy paste as the front page but it is still pretty simple. Before I go further, if you cant figure out how to place ads in the proxified pages check out this How-to.(leave a comment if you need more explanation).

Okay Now lets begin. there are three types of ad spots on a proxified page, the banner, Pop-ups and Inline ads. Ill go over each one.

First the banner ad, this ad will be displayed and loaded each time a user browses a page. This banner cant be overly big or you’ll lose your users, so I tend to stay close to the 468 by 60 size. There are a few types of ads you can fill this space with such as affiliates, cpc or cpm. CPM is the safest route as you get payed even if the users doesnt click or buy anything, While this sounds awesome the problem is its hard to find an ad network that will pay well per page view and also allows proxies. The best Ive found so far is Adbrite but they have major issues where even though the advertiser says they’ll pay $10 cpm, you only end up with maybe a dollar. CPC is a bit harder than cpm as none of the major cpc networks allow their ads on proxified pages, your best off using a network like adbrite that serves both cpc and cpms. Finally that brings us to affiliate programs. These programs(CJ and Azoogle) pay per action albeit a sign up or a purchase. If you can find the right program that appeals to your users than this is the best route as the payout per action is sometimes $20+ but beware you may get 100 clicks and no money with affiliates so I suggest you poll your users to know what their demographic is, so you can find the perfect affiliate.

Second Pop-Ups, these ads are very ineffective in my experience, as most users have pop-up blockers and if the pop up happens to load they just exit out and become frustrated with your site, So if your traffic is good(Northamerican/west europe) dont use pop-up networks like adversal to display pop ups instead make your own pop-ups with brand name affiliates like blockbuster, a users less likely to leave your site because of a friendly brand like blockbuster than a pharma pop-up like herbal viagre, also brand names pay the best per action and have higher ctr or if you dont care to spend all that time building your own affiliate based pop-up s you can do full page ads(Adbrite) a slightly more user friendly version of a pop-up. That said if your traffic is very heavily from countries like china or Iran and isnt converting in terms of adsense clicks, Id suggest using .htaccess redirects to display to those countries pop-ups from adversal or made by you.

Last but not least by any measure, In line ads. These are ads that will actually display in the page the user is browsing as a double underlined word and when they scroll over that word a caption pops up with an ad. There are sites like kontera that do a good job of filling the page with contextual ads but others like adbrite do terrible only displaying one or two ads and always for the same words and the ad wont even be related half the time. Initially I was going to say this is kinda spammy but you could potentially earn enough with inline ads to get rid of the banner so users might be more willing to have less noticeable ads inline than an intrusive banner. So I strongly suggest giving inlines a try and if you know of any good networks that provide inline other than kontera please leave your suggestions in the comments.

And that is how to monetize a proxy. Keep in mind though every proxy is different even if they have the same template and that the only way you can truly know what will work best for you is to try everything and track how well your traffic converts for not only type of ad but also the different ad networks.