What to do with inherited site?
 

Hello all, this is a combo introduction / question thread.

So, about 2 years back I inherited a niche fetish website, bbw-chan.nl.
It's a fairly standard chan-clone with a focus on, of course, bbw / weight gain.
In the past, it had a pretty standard community. Amateurs posted themselves, discussion was just as frequent as content, and some original creators posted stuff in the bbwdraw section. And all was well. The last admin tried to monetize via scummy popunders / popups / etc, but never really made a dime. After awhile, he essentially gave up and that's where I came in. The mods basically handed me the site and said please save it.

I think I've done pretty well. We're in the top 10,000 sites in the US, we have a good amount of traffic for a site our size. The problem is, the culture has changed. One of the first moves I made was to move to a DMCA-immune host so that Do-Not-Post lists and DMCA notices were a thing of a past. This was a double edged sword. While the userbase and interaction soared after the change, it also changed the culture. Original content producers left, and users essentially made the site the pirate bay of fatty porn. Content flows freely, but this also introduces a problem.

I pay for the site anonymously via bitcoin. I've never once exposed my personal information to any part of the hosting process. We've taken donations via bitcoin in the past before, but it was never steady enough to even pay the bills.

So we come to an impass. WTF do I do with this site? If i institute DMCA again so I comply with US law and can take traditional payments from traditional advertisers, user participation will plummet. If I stay DMCA-free, I can only ever accept donations.

Do I just give up like the last guy? Any ideas? I'm not looking to make a profit, I just want the site to sustain itself and make back the $120/month it costs, which I know it can do based on the traffic we get.

Interesting situation. You really just need to find monetization sources that are willing to work with you (or at least look the other direction). I get the impression you might not have tried very hard yet, tbh.

First of all, I wouldn't be so certain you can't run with traditional CPM advertising. PornTrex.com and many other sites have exoclick banners and non-compliant full-length content. Hell, piratebay even has exo banners. If exoclick won't approve you, a smaller network like trafficshop might. Also, not saying I condone this but, it's pretty easy to get a fully compliant website approved and then just use those ad-zones on other sites. I do it with my sites (which admittedly are all fully-compliant) and exoclick has never said anything about it. At your traffic level they might not ever look close enough to notice.

Now, CPM networks might be hard to work with in your situation. But I feel pretty certain most affiliate programs wouldn't really care if you send traffic from non-compliant sites. So you might just have to figure out the right offers and work to monetize your ad zones on your own. On my sites, my second biggest revenue source is chaturbate--I built a native "online now" widget like you see on pornhub or xhamster. It works amazing. In your case you could use the JSON api and try to filter for bbw videos, might work great. Chaturbate probably isn't gonna give a shit where your traffic is coming from, they'll probably never even look.

You could do the same thing with adult dating and adult games. Find some bbw-related offers, build some banners, put them on your site. It'll be a pain to constantly update your creatives and offers (which is normally what media buyers do for you, via CPM networks) but if you can't work with CPM networks, you might just have to work a little harder.

Hubtraffic also probably wouldn't care if you started hand-selecting some bbw-related videos to embed on your site. They pay real well, doubt they'll care if you're fully dmca-compliant. Approval is automatic, no one is looking that close where the traffic is coming from. You just have to try.

Finally, push notifications and crypto miners. Plenty of scummy companies in these niches would love your traffic.

You have great traffic and a nicely-targeted niche. You should be making thousands of dollars a month with this site. Good luck!

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I did try crypto Mining (coinhive) and Bitcoin advertising networks (adbit)but nothing paid out anything worth talking about like we're literally talking less than $30 a month. As far as the crypto mining goes I never forced it or hid it I just had a page where they could opt in and use it if they wanted to... of course that didn't work. To be honest I'm afraid of the backlash if I do anything to significant to impact the user experience as far as ads or mining goes.

My privacy is very important to me. I don't want to have to face a lawsuit just because I ignored a dmca for too long or went on vacation and didn't respond to a takedown request in time. And that's my fear of using traditional advertisers: some copyright Bulldog hassles an Advertiser enough and they might just get my name and address. To me it's just not worth the risk even if significant money is involved.

But you're right that I must not have tried hard enough because I've never heard of exoclick. I should probably do a little bit more research. Thanks again.

That's a smart thing to be thinking about, but you're not making any money right now. You're worrying about long-term value of your site when you don't even have any current value. You can disrespect your users a little bit and still retain most of them, and make a lot more money. Fuck the users that stop visiting when you show them a few ads, they were never gonna make you any money anyway. They don't matter.

Observation: You seem to be intensely risk-averse and just not willing to do the things you need to do in order to make money.

I miss DMCA requests all the time. They go to spam, I'm on vacation, I'm on a bender. You know what happens? 99% of them give up (I'm small fries anyway, and so are you, we're not worth much time or effort to a content owner), 1% go to my hosting provider (who contacts me and you better believe I respond to THOSE. I've fucked up and missed one before and got HTTP access to my server disabled until I removed the content). Which people do you think are serious enough to pursue an expensive lawsuit? Yeah, the ones contacting your hosting provider. How many people would be dumb enough to waste money filing a lawsuit before at least TRYING to contact your hosting provider? Not many.

My recommendation? Ignore every DMCA request that comes to your email, like you're currently doing, but ask your hosting provider to forward any takedown requests that THEY receive to you. Respond to those. Remove the content. (it's a chan anyway, isn't the content automatically removed after a day or two?)

Then you can put ads on your site and feel more safe that someone won't try to get your info from an advertiser--if they're that serious, they'll be going to your hosting provider first. PornTrex has exoclick ads, infringing content, and 50x your traffic; have they been shut down? Nope.

If you just can't fathom the idea of doing something with a tiny amount of risk in order to make money, adult's not for you.

Good luck!

You should both be ashamed of yourselves :mad:

ermac you thieving bastard, I'd just turn the site off at this point, if you can't make any $$$'s without stealing content, then just turn it off.

I've made a note, and if I see any ad's go up, I'll find some program owners that have their content on your site and get your payments cancelled :1orglaugh:1orglaugh

You silly motherfuckers are going to find that content theft is no longer business as usual here on gfy :Oh crap

Fair enough, I suppose. I would add that, we don't host any of the content ourselves, the users generally upload content to a 3rd-party file host. So in that way, we're just link aggregation like google. If google has links to piratebay, does that mean google is in violation? No, not really. But I get your point. There was a time when the site wasn't nearly as focused on piracy as it is now. I only made this post to get ideas about which way the site should go. You'll notice I even suggested going back to DMCA. You seem to be a little blatant in your hostility, so I'm guessing you've been burned before. Sorry about that.

Let's talk about your Traffic ... :thumbsup

See sig for contact .

Yes content theft chaps my ass :1orglaugh

If your not hosting the content, and your users are simply linking too it, why would you go the extremes of getting dmca-free hosting, simply remove any links that get complaints.

I mean shit man, you've got a gold mine of a site there with low bounce rate, good time on site, and steady strong growth over the last year!!! Build some relationships with some paysites, get a cam program white label setup. There are a ton of different ad's that you could display that won't piss your surfers off, toys - nutra - cam - dating.

Your not serving up large videos files, so it's not like you have to put up 20 ad's on each page like a tube does to keep the lights on, keep it simple and clean. Let your surfers know that the ad's keep the lights on so that they can get their fill of fatty's :pimp

I understand that surfers are going to post shit they are not suppose too, but when you give them free rain, your just asking for trouble.

Your just telling them to post stolen shit, cause I don't care :Oh crap And they aren't the group of people that are going to make you any money anyway, better to have the true fan on your site!!

If you want to make any money with the site, your going to have to put yourself out there. Get the site cleaned up, and add in some revenue making plugs to the site. Stay away from pop-up/unders, just make sure your surfer knows that if they want to keep coming back, they have to put up with the ad's.

Good luck, I hope you can return to the light, and finally start to realize some profit from your hard work :)

I went to the extremes because we lost so many mods during the transition that I could not keep up with the volume of takedown requests, and also because I didn't really want my real life info somehow forever associated with the site. I have a real life, I'm not really a profit-focused or admin-centric guy, I just kind of fell into the role. I enjoyed the site for what it was and when given the chance to save it from the dustbin of the internet, I did. I made choices from the start to protect my anonymity for all these reasons, and it's hamstrung me ever since as far as even paying for the site itself, let alone profiting from it.

I can't imagine I'm the only webmaster in the world in this situation, and I thought I would share my thoughts, thanks for sharing yours.

bro it's a chan site for bbw pics and discussion, the amount of content theft going on is miniscule compared to just about any other UGC site, the only difference is for some silly reason he thinks ignoring the handful of DMCAs he gets is somehow making his users happier (it's not). I'm sorry the world is how it is but getting up in arms about "thieving bastards" over a bbw chan site is just crazy, you must hate everything from bittorrent to pornhub to 4chan, and none of these things are going away because it's just how the world works.

It's not professional adult content ending up on OPs site anyway, it's not your content or probably anyone who posts on this board, it's dudes posting pics of their girlfriends and models they like or reposting shit they saw on sex.com

being non-dmca compliant probably isn't even helping his business, how many DMCA's do you even think he receives? Did you look at the content on his site?