HN Explorer

Fine I'll reveal a past success. It ranked 480 on Alexa at its peak.

11 points by pinksoda ↗ HN
People here seem to be very distrusting so I'll tell you one of my past success's that isn't up anymore.

I was the sole founder of MovieForumz.com which reached a best rank of around 480ish (global) and had profits in the millions.

I'll post a link to my blog in the comments incase anyone wants to read it. I'm using it to share experience, information, and insight while taking SinkFloat from a no-name, worthless website to a multi-million dollar success.

http://www.sinkfloat.com/blog/

17 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 40.9 ms ] thread
pinksoda
Alright so the blog that got downvoted to hell before was http://www.sinkfloat.com/blog/

A few people contacted me with questions so I wanted to make this thread so they could ask them and maybe it could benefit more people.

gridspy
I think SinkFloat is a cool idea.

At the moment, the blog has pretty much no interesting content. Put something intellectually stimulating on there before submitting it to HN again if you want some traction.

sosuke
When you started your other projects that gave you your current claimed capital did you start from zero or did you already have other sources of money (investors, inheritance etc).
pinksoda
That's a great question.

I started with pretty much zero. The first one is always the hardest because you don't have many connections or money. It's a lot of hard work but it gets easier the 2nd, 3rd, 4th time around, unless of course you're burnt out.

When you start with zero it just forces you to think a different way. Instead of just throwing money at something, you have to be creative and strategize.

jashmenn
Story lines up: (note talkburst in the email):

whois movieforumz.com

   Administrative Contact:
      Corp, Gimado  talkburst@gmail.com

   Domain Name: MOVIEFORUMZ.COM
      Created on: 10-Dec-06
      Expires on: 10-Dec-10
      Last Updated on: 08-Dec-0
pinksoda
You guys didn't even give me a chance to defend myself really. I was downvoted a bazillion times and couldn't post anymore.

Rough crowd in here!

maximumwage
According to Compete, MovieForumz currently has around 5000 unique visitors a month. Did you sell the site, or is it still bringing in money - albeit with a smaller audience?
pinksoda
MovieForumz is a past success of mine and is no longer running. It has been closed for probably 2 years now and still receives about 5-10 thousand uniques per day even after all this time.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/movieforumz.com make sure you have it set to MAX and you'll see when it was ranked very well. It received about a million unique visitors per day.

pinksoda
I'll tell you guys about myself and you can let me know if you have any questions.

I'm a solo founder. I create all the sites myself as far as design/coding goes. I mostly use PHP/MySQL. I bootstrapped my first site with just cash and credit cards.

Ask me almost anything!

nudge
So from archive.org it looks like it was a site that linked to other sites where people could watch movies for free.

And that eventually you got shut down due to legal threats.

So my question is, how did you make money from it? Advertising?

pinksoda
It was running before there was court precedent that made it risky to link to movies hosted on sites like YouTube and Dailymotion. The shutdown was part of a strategic business decision.

I made money from it initially using Adwords. I remember my first month running it, only made about $400. They decided not to allow sites that linked to copyright videos, so I had to find alternatives, which turned out to be great.

I mostly used Clickbank and (briefly) Zango. I'm currently part of Clickbank's APEX program which is their super affiliate program for top earners.

Element_
Exactly how much money did you make from it? and have you been able to sustain the same kind of returns on other projects since then ?
pinksoda
More than a million dollars a year from MovieForumz, primarily using Clickbank affiliate program. I targetted my users who were there to see movies, with an affiliate site that also offered movie downloads/viewing. I tried other affiliate programs like Netflix and Gamefly but it was an epic fail.

I've made more money from my other sites. MovieForumz was one of the smaller earners(except in the beginning, it was pretty significant).

djshah
Besides affiliates, did you have any other business model for your other websites? What themes were your other successes targeting besides entertainment (or what other forms of entertainment)? Were they also aggregation sites?