How do sites like rapidshare make a profit ?
 

Would someone be so kind as to enlighten me ?

Who is rapidshare and why do we care?

http://www.rapidshare.de - I'm curious how a site like this makes a profit

stealing content like pron videos and then charging $10 a month for people that want to download it without waiting 1 hour in between downloads

dirt cheap bandwidth costs, and they do have premium accounts + ads = business model.

9 t3-2.mpd01.fra03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.1.30) 94.548 ms 92.483 ms 92.170 ms
10 v55.mpd01.fra05.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.1.2) 92.162 ms 92.387 ms 92.170 ms
11 rapidshare.de (130.117.156.231) 91.920 ms 91.872 ms 91.929 ms
>


cogent come on now you can get bandwidth for 10mbps or cheaper depending on your commit rates :)

adverts.... the majority i guess

Would they make a lot from their premium accounts ? Anyone know how much ?

Being ranked #35 by Alexa, I highly doubt this can pay their bandwith bills.
YouToube is ranked #18 and is said to pay about 1M per month for their uplink.

If they do only 1/4th of YouToube, they'd have to pay 250k for bandwith each month.
That's 8-9k a day or at least 665 of their most expensive premium accounts each day, just to break even. Almost 1500 if they burn half of what's YouTube is burning. And I didn't even include the share Paypal is taking, their hardware costs, ...

Of course those numbers are only a wild guess, but you get the idea.

Nobody needs to be concerned with such things. This thread should be removed.

the ads? 8char

Try megaupload.com that thing makes bling bling from adbrite's interstitial system

I guess that they are making money with Adsense & their premium services.

adsense mostly, pretty fucked up if you ask me

Have you ever used their site? Try downloading even just a few files and they'll ask you to wait an hour or get a premium account. They obviously generate revenue from all of their ads, but I'd bet they make a lot more than you realize in premium account purchases.

DAMN :eek7

1mil a month in bandwidth? given 10mbps thats what 100Gbps of commit rates. With that much throughput you're still lower than 10/mbps Maybe their entire hosting operation costs mil per month including space.. 15k sq feet in a dupont fabros datacenter would run you ~200k/month people and bandwidth.

They try to install spyware on people viewing the movies and files, cause that damn page just tried to install it on me.

Other similar sites like youtube.com lose $1 million a month (no shit). They have VC money and are burning through it fast. They are waiting for a big buy out.

According to Forbes YouTube is estimated to stream about 40 million videos a day, which adds up to 200 TB each and every day. So let's run some numbers:

200TB a day is 8.33TB or something like 8500GB per hour.
142GB each minute, 2.37GB each second.

2.37 gigaBYTE/sec = 19 gigaBIT/sec

19 gbit/sec average over 24 hours. Don't forget that there's no way their load is evenly distributed over the whole day, so let's double that to support increased traffic during daytime and add another couple percent to catch sudden traffic spikes.

If the estimations are right, they probably need at least 30-40 Gbit of non-cheap-ass traffic. Can't compare that to offers some hosts may throw in every now and then either to attract new customers, by overbooking their lines.

And yeah, hardware costs are probably included in that 1M-a-month figure, but who cares? If rapidshare runs something like this, they have to pay for the hardware too.

I still have no clue how something like this can add up without some stupid VCs who want to burn money in another dotcom bubble.

Considering that YouTube gets a big chunk of its traffic from MySpace, maybe they would be a good buyout by MySpace? Anyway, they better generate revenue soon or all those awesome vids online would go poof! Looks like 1999 DotCom Mania all over again :helpme :(

rapidshare is so full of stolen content, its not funny

They dont make money.

What's VC money?


Great thread, I've always wondered too... and I'm guessing these sites must lose money. I don't think you can recuperate costs on tons of free video content from adbrite.

you'd be surprised what a company can make off their data. Not only in advertising but offline data as well if they collect snail mail information. I know companies that pay up to $3/head on data. Don't just think online marketing they are probably into alot of marketing deals and with that much volume you can get pretty good deals :)

Good points. It's interesting to ponder the possibilities.

What does "VC money" stand for?

venture capital

No offence, but have you ever looked at rapidshare?
At least for me there's only a banner loading and a pop-up when you actually download something. Maybe my popup-blocker is too good and I don't get 99% of what all the other people get, but I don't see how to make much profit from advertising like this.

They don't ask for you email-address anywhere and processing is done trough paypal, so they won't get much personal information other than you IP address and the browser you use either.

Did I miss something you or someone else noticed?

Thanks! I wonder who would invest in something like this. At this point it would seem like throwing away money. But can't really tell without looking at the books I guess.

Why doesn't a site like rapidshare throw up some adbrite ads or some other ads just for extra income. If you have the traffic why not utilize it. I don't get it.

There are always ppl who have burn money as they call it - a friend of mine deals with portofolios like that, 5-500 mln us$, zero percentage profitrate garantueed. But if it takes of its a blast. Basically legal gambling.

High risk stuff like Ukr banks etc, although adult is more difficult, there are ppl willing to invest in this and more then you would think.

I think the answer is rapidshare is nowhere near as big in terms of bandwidth costs because alexa rankings are full of crap and lots of big sites run rapidshare ads so it looks a lot bigger than it is.

oops double post, GFY needs repair bad...

YouTube pays $330-400k/m bandwidth. Read it this morning in the paper

Are those official numbers YouTube announced? Is there an online version somewhere of that article somewhere?

The 1M figure I spoke about is based on this Forbes Article from 2 months ago. As neither YouTube nor Limelight would comment on their agreement, it's a wild guess though.

Seeing some "confirmed" numbers would be interesting.

I have not dug deep into rapid share nor looked to much into them. However.. companies can write little companies like this off for taxes.. gotta show a loss somewhere.

I'm sure its creative accounting somewhere.

Its frustrating to see a site like youtube with so much traffic and the fools who run it not having a clue how to monetise it. They need to give me a job on a % basis and see if my ideas can turn a profit ;)

250k a month in bandwidth isn't shit. between premium customers and adverts, they easily cover that.

they're hoping to sell it or get some type of syndication deal with a television network for their content. that's when they will make their profit. not every site is built to generate profit right away. the reason it's successful is because it's not plastered with adverts.

Obviously but my ideas arent for in your face OTT advertising. There is more than one way to milk a cash cow like that. Now they may be hoping to be bought out but if it drags on and on then the VC money is going to dry up at some point. They need a big source of income. The site would be a lot more appealing to a takeover bid if they were generating a profit. AOL, Yahoo MSN, Google, Myspace, they all already have their own competing video services, if they were gonna buy youtube I think it would have happened already.