Autonomous Websites: EZ Money Or Waste Of Time?

Posted in Internet

Most webmasters nowadays are lazy. In fact, that’s usually the impetus behind why they want to become a webmaster in the first place. Nothing better than being your own boss, working at your own pace/time, and best of all, working from the comfort of your own home. But most web-”masters” are actually just web-”wannabes”. Everyday, I have to deal with a handful of people who ask me for help making money on the Internet. Most of them think the Internet is easy to master. Many of them think that writing a blog on WordPress, quite possibly the easiest CMS to manage in the world (as if CMSs weren’t easy enough in and of themselves), makes them an Internet entrepreneur. Almost all of them think short term and look for quick cash opportunities. Only a select few look long term, willing to invest a shit-ton of time and tons of resources into a project which may not reward a single cent till months down the road. In the end, the short term thinkers tend to call it quits in a matter of weeks; the long term thinkers end up with some serious money in the bank.

Nevertheless, there are still many ways to make cash online with minimal effort. Websites like online arcades, proxies, and file hosting services offer valuable services that millions of Internet users use daily. With such a large audience of users to cater to, there is generally a lot of room to take part in these niches. Though competition is fierce, and you’ll find yourself hard-pressed trying to game your SEO to the top of the search results, you can still make a good deal of money if you play your cards right.

Not to mention that these sites are largely autonomous: after the initial setup, you essentially don’t have to do a single thing to keep them running. No need to add content daily, no need to pay a staff to keep the site up to date, no need to even visit the site on a daily basis.  They can run and grow on their own, just add water (ahem, just provide the hosting payments).

I, on the side, own a network of 30 or so online arcade websites. Among a few of the smaller ones are AllBestGames.com, ArcadeNoob.com, and BuffGamer.com. Altogether, the three of them rake in nearly $400 a month from Yahoo! Publisher Network and various CPM advertising networks. Do the math, and you’ll see that I earn mid-$X,XXX from the compilation of all the arcade sites that I own.

The best part? I haven’t touched a single one of the arcade sites since late 2006/early 2007, and they still are growing. Each arcade pulls in an average of 500 unique visits a day, with an average of nearly 2,000 pageviews a day. This is the definition of autonomous. Making money (if small in amount) without doing a single thing or spending a single cent on advertising. Word of mouth and viral marketing handled it all for me.

Of course, it took a few months for the sites to get going. Didn’t make a cent for the first six months I ran the network (didn’t have any ads at first so as to attract visitors). Most webmasters would give up at that point. But I held on tight to my portfolio of independent websites, and now, thanks to the likes of Google search referrals, they all receive traffic and make a pretty penny.

I also ran a network of over 50 proxy sites once upon a time. Names like DopeProxy.com, ProxySecks.com, and BRBProxy.com were among a few of the many proxy sites that I ran for a while. Theses extremely easy-to-setup websites made quite a lot of money (around low-$X,XXX a month for all of the proxies combined) for a few months, but as they expanded, server usage increased dramatically, and the proxies started to get blocked by the big name blockers (Websense, McAfee, etc), which decreased US traffic, making the ROI continuously worse as days went by (as advertisers don’t care for international traffic). Ended up shutting them all down, wasn’t worth the stress or the hassle (at least for me, I’m sure a lot of people would love an extra thousand dollars a month of spending money).

So, I conclude that autonomous websites CAN be worthwhile. I would not recommend making them the main focus of your “making money online” ventures, but sprinkled in between bigger projects, they can make be a nice monetary buffer and offer some good supplementary income for you to build off of.