Proxy Builder Blog

June was a modest month for my proxy websites with profits slowly declining into the summer. I decided to give myself more motivation to drive my earnings up. From now on I’ll try and give a break down of each month’s proxy earnings on this blog.

I’m hearing lots of proxy webmasters are increasingly struggling with low profits. I’ve personally found with proxies its always been possible to achieve profit, you just have to get more creative and work harder for the payoff. I also found that its a great time to start proxy sites in summer so you’re all set to get traffic in the winter months.

I’m listing the ad companies below by the earnings I achieved in June, starting from highest to lowest.

Adsense - http://www.google.com/adsense

Earnings: $505.96

Freedom of Ads - http://www.freedomofads.com

Earnings: $110.11

Canep Media - http://www.canepmedia.com

Earnings: $87.94

Mediashakers - http://www.mediashakers.com

Earnings: $52.54

Hide My IP - http://www.hidemyip.com/

Earnings: $14.98

Adversal - http://www.adversal.com

Earnings: $4.14

Total Earnings: $775.67

Overall web proxies are still a great niche to be in, however it takes a lot of trial and error to create good revenue streams. I am still sitting on a vast array of untapped proxy resources and plan to develop them over the coming months. I am currently tweaking my server configurations to see if I cant squeeze more traffic out of them and results look promising so far.

I see alot of people requesting information on which advertisers to use on proxy websites. I decided to compile a list of best ad providers I’ve found so far. I am using all of these companies on my proxy websites with varying degree’s of success. They are ordered in importance and the revenue generating capabilities I’ve seen from them.

Google Adsense
As always, Adsense is the exclusive ad provider on the homepage of most of my web proxies. I’ve found Adsense to consistently give the best results and yield the highest CPM for the main page. Its great to experiment with all the different ad format and options available to achieve maximum revenue.

Canep Media
I have only been working with Canep for two months but they provide an excellent publisher interface with realtime earnings & impression tracking. I use Canep across a large portion of my network with CPM hovering around $.10. They allow you to place ads on proxied pages which can help boost your income from these hard to monetize positions.

Freedom Of Ads
Almost identical adserving platform to Canep Media, they use adECN to trade ad inventory. Fill rates seem slightly lower than Canep but I have only recently added FoA to my proxies so things may improve in future. If you’ve learnt how to work with Canep its easy to jump right in.

Media Shakers
I added Media Shakers to my proxy network in the last few days. Things arent looking good to date - CPM’s are abyssmal, the administrative interface is too basic and they offer a simple contact page for support. They do allow proxy websites however and I’ll get back to you on them after further testing.

Adversal
I have recently removed all Adversal code from every web proxy I operate. I do not see pop-ups as a viable way to sustain traffic, I hate them and I’m sure my visitors would too. I only included them in the list because they do accept proxy publishers, I would not recommend them however.

Hide My IP
I came accross Hide My IP about two months ago. They provide an affiliate based system for anonymous proxy software. I’ve made a few sales to date and been paid via paypal twice. They arent anything special but they can help to fill spare ad inventory on your proxied pages. You earn money on a per-sale basis.

Adbrite
I had a dilemma whether to include Adbrite, since they terminated many of my own proxy site ads without warning a couple months back. People are still earning money through them though but I would will offer a strong warning for you not to use their services on proxied pages. You may lose all earnings, without warning and with no recourse.

I welcome all suggestions of other web proxy advertisers, please add them in the comments if you know of any more.

Over the last few days I have begun updating the Adsense ads across my entire proxy network to the new format. Well, I say new, but as I’m sure you’re all aware of the changes that were put in place about two months ago. You can now manage all aspects of the advert just by logging into Adsense and I’m going to break down the three advantages I see for all publishers.

The first benefit I saw in using the new ads was the slight drop in the amount of on-page code. If you’re using 3 ad units per page, which seemed to be the average for my own sites, you’ll see about a 500 byte drop in the filesize. This is going to help speed up load times for end users and reduce the amount of javascript having to processed from your website. In the age of superfast connections it might not have an impact for some, but remember there is still a large chunk of <56k users on the net.

I’m not 100% sure on this, but I do believe the “Show non-Google ads from another URL ” feature was included within the Adsense javascript that was placed on your site. It is now alot simpler to manage alternative advertisers from your Adsense control panel instead of having to go back through each site when you want to change or add an alternate monetization source.

My number one favourite feature of this change is the color palette management. I used very few palettes before but now I see this as a viable method to keep my visitors from getting ad blindness. Ad blindess tends to happen with regular users who subconsciously skip past or avoid the ad units altogether. By having numerous color schemes across my website adverts, I hope to draw more attention back and subsequently achieve more revenue.

I’m sure theres plenty of other reasons that slipped my mind, but I am already seeing the rewards for changing all my ads to the more centralized system. It is already a mandatory requirement for creating new ad units and I can see Adsense reigning it in for webmasters alot more in future.

I have been quite busy lately juggling my full time job and all my sites. Im glad to say traffic and revenue are creeping back up through september, a few server optimizations helped there. I’ve always kept the proxy builder blog as an extra, I hope my proxy articles help people over time but I cannot dedicate myself to writing regularly. I hope that people are learning and experimenting with my ideas, I love new competition! Enough rambling, back to business.

I have made some very interesting purchases lately and with the closure of the PHProxy project, my timing couldent of been better. I now own great keyword domains for all the best PHP based proxy scripts around. Zelune.info was my first one word proxy script domain, quite a fitting TLD I think.

The Glype proxy script is a quite a young contender but if updates & patches continue at this pace it will be great. You can now use our free glype web proxy at Glype.net. You can also download the very powerful PHP glype proxy script from our site, but you must keep a link back to the original glype website to use it.

I also snapped up Surrogafier.info, the name of a increasingly popular php proxy script. I definitely got a very fair price and grabbed a snazzy new proxy template for it too. I have used this script on a couple of my proxy websites and found it had quite good functionality. The site needs some work doing to it and I will offer a free source for the Surrogafier proxy script download.

I have been slacking off a bit on my websites lately. Its difficult to work 24/7 but I have many more proxy projects underway and I showcase them here when they are complete.

Over the last couple months I have been using Adversal popups on the browsing pages of some web proxies. Although I made a reasonable amount of money from them, I decided that the negatives outweighed the positives. So I proceeded to strip popups out of my web proxies for several reasons I will cover in this article.

Lets face it, no one likes popups. They have always been seen as intrusive, annoying, ugly and sometimes malicious. I have an inbuilt browser popup blocker with my Google toolbar but as I can tell from my Adversal stats - many do not. To be honest, I’ve never even seen a popup from Adversal so why should I put my loyal proxy users through it? I do use a fast, custom proxy script but any advantages of that can quickly be washed away by an uninvited flashing eyesore jumping around on the screen. If I was a regular proxy user I’d be searching for a new site pretty quick.

Besides your visitors you should also be looking to the search engines. Search engine bots and spiders are becoming more clever every day, if they browse to your page and find some easily categorized popup code you could see your search rankings slump or disappear altogether. You may even have your site categorized as “spyware” if you ran an ad infected with one of many exploits. Popups have had alot of bad press and even the newest web users will quickly turn off a site that runs them.

Although I have listed alot of negative points, I can only keep my web proxies popup free while other sources of monetization are available to me. I think my proxy sites have a better viral effect without pesky popups. I would rather someone pass my proxy website address on than make a few more cents off a visitor who will abandon my proxy forever.