I bought several image hosting sites 3 or 4 years ago, but I eventually ended up selling them for less than I paid. It is a huge hassle to run them. I was constantly having hacking problems and server overload problems, and I also had workers in India manually deleting all the adult images. Uploads of copyrighted images and porn were a huge problem. Because of that, it was too risky to run Google ads on this type of site, because I would risk losing my account. I did run them just on the main page of the site and the upload page, and not the picture pages, but that did make a lot of money since the picture pages were the pages that got the huge number of page views.

Bandwidth was another big issue. I had one of my sites spread over 9 dedicated Linux servers, and that worked well, but bandwidth was a problem. There would be spikes where it was doing way over my web host’s limits, and if I limited the bandwidth to the 10mbps each server allowed, then the site would slow to a crawl because of bandwidth throttling.

Nowadays there is more sophisticated technology that can handle all of this, and bandwidth is cheaper and less of a problem, but I think it is still hard to get good ad revenue from an image hosting site. It is a good project for somebody who has a lot of time to deal with the ad sales and all the site problems, but not something I am interested in doing anymore.

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Last Modified : July 28th, 2009 Filed under : Internet Business Navigate : Previous post / Next post