[Journey] $50k/month with a video streaming host

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Update:
Traffic has been slow recently. And that is fine. I haven't been actively pushing for more users for the past 13 days. I've been focused on getting our cpms up. This means I've been focused on stopping fraudulent traffic.

We had a user by the name "smithwsion". They would get thousands of views and we would end up paying them $1900+. I decided to look more into their traffic and saw some weird things. Funny enough, another competitor ended up banning them because of their fake traffic.

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THIS HELPS A TON. I am able to see what fake traffic looks like on our end because I know 100% that smithwsion's traffic is fraudulent.
So from here on out, we'll be blocking a lot of this traffic. I've already reached out to a few users with some information about their traffic, because I suspect it to be fraudulent.

It all started with smithwsion because one of our ad networks said bot traffic was coming from a specific website (This was the website that smithwsion posted on).

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I've been grilling out ad networks for the past 2 weeks for information about our bot traffic, and I finally got something helpful!

This is going to be a massive turning point in our business. Tomorrow I will be placing new ad codes and trying a new ad network. Now that a lot of our bot traffic is being blocked (for now), I hope to see good cpms.

Keep you updated! HOPEFULLY WE START MAKING SOME GOOD MONEY. Praying for good cpms
 

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What's going to be your marketing strategy ?
Well it's a little challenging because it's not like I can just run some Google or Facebook ads to get users.

I have to go to these websites that use file hosts and convince them to switch to us. It's difficult because they're already using a host that they're fine with and make money from. No purpose in risking their revenue to switch to a new host unless it's drastically worth it.

Good news is our ad networks now say that we don't have proxy traffic and our cpms can go back up! I'll track this the next few days and see how things are looking. We do need more USA/Tier 1 traffic....
 
Here are some of our expenses before launching:
Domain: $11,000 (I regret this, but you live and you learn)
Development: $15,329
Servers: $1,275
Misc: ~$1,000
The development cost $15,329? That's a very huge budget. I'm interested in this kind of project too.
 
The development cost $15,329? That's a very huge budget. I'm interested in this kind of project too.
Yea, at the time of this original thread. But it's more and more every day for new updates/fixes
 
Important Pivotal Moment:
Right now we've been using Bunny to stream our videos on our host. However, it is EXTREMELY costly. Mainly expensive in terms of bandwidth usage. I crunched some numbers and we are paying $85+ a day just to stream our videos (to not that many viewers).

This is not profitable at this rate, even if we scale to large economies of scale.

We are going to switch our structure to using entirely Dedicated Servers with HLS streaming.

This will bring our current price to $8 a day for storage AND bandwidth (at current usage, of course want to scale).

I think we're going to this solution (https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js) for integrating our dedicated servers to plyr.io video player (not entirely sure the correct structure we should have in place)

I'm not sure how long this will take. It'll probably take ABSOLUTELY FOREVER..... gosh

Frustrating, but it's those entrepreneurs that are willing to never give up that are successful
 
This is really a bold move i must say maybe just launching an AI SAAS and heavily promoting it wouldnt have brought this much trouble. But i wish you good luck
 
Following, good luck with your journey.

- Do you have any system for check if a release already exist in you server ? I'm not a tech guys, but like megaupload use HASH MD5 I think and just generate a new link for anyone who re-upload the same files on their server. (just delete the link when they receive DMCA but not the file)

Most people who upload use the same release from torrent or scene.
 
- Do you have any system for check if a release already exist in you server ? I'm not a tech guys, but like megaupload use HASH MD5 I think and just generate a new link for anyone who re-upload the same files on their server. (just delete the link when they receive DMCA but not the file
Yea. Someone suggested this earlier. That’s something we can implement later. Just more worried about the bigger picture stuff right now (ie OVH and HLS)
 
Hi
I just wanted to know do we get paid if our traffic is mostly traffic telegram? And is it okay to upload movies? copyrighted
 
Hi
I just wanted to know do we get paid if our traffic is mostly traffic telegram? And is it okay to upload movies? copyrighted
Traffic is traffic. As long as it is legitimate. But we’ve have had users that send fake traffic via telegram, so don’t be them.

And yea, a lot of people upload movies
 
Traffic is traffic. As long as it is legitimate. But we’ve have had users that send fake traffic via telegram, so don’t be them.

And yea, a lot of people upload movies
If he send the traffic from Telegram maybe you will find some fake or not so good traffic but it's depends on your filtering system, How they will tackle it after all most of the users don't know how to remove fake traffic, They all know about traffic !
 
I plan to create a website like yours. I suggest using a private IP Address API to detect the quality of an IP to identify bots, proxies, or hosting services. Also, use FingerprintJS to detect devices.
 
Traffic is traffic. As long as it is legitimate. But we’ve have had users that send fake traffic via telegram, so don’t be them.

And yea, a lot of people upload movies
Savefiles have problems?

"File is no longer available as it expired or has been deleted."
 
UPDATE:
We launched for two months and kept track of our revenue and expenses daily. After some time, we came to the conclusion that our current CDN is too expensive. This is what we were using for streaming/storage/uploading/encoding/etc. The reason it was so expensive was because of Bandwidth usage (We were charged money for each view).

And so, my developers have been working on scraping everything that we've been working on to switch to using Dedicated Servers with unlimited bandwidth and hls streaming.

This is a complicated process, but something that will save costs. It's frustrating because SaveFiles took 8 months of development to launch. And it feels like I just wasted an entire year.

But I think we're doing something better and needed. And so the goal is to re-launch the new infrastructure this upcoming week. #trusttheprocess
 
UPDATE:
We launched for two months and kept track of our revenue and expenses daily. After some time, we came to the conclusion that our current CDN is too expensive. This is what we were using for streaming/storage/uploading/encoding/etc. The reason it was so expensive was because of Bandwidth usage (We were charged money for each view).

And so, my developers have been working on scraping everything that we've been working on to switch to using Dedicated Servers with unlimited bandwidth and hls streaming.

This is a complicated process, but something that will save costs. It's frustrating because SaveFiles took 8 months of development to launch. And it feels like I just wasted an entire year.

But I think we're doing something better and needed. And so the goal is to re-launch the new infrastructure this upcoming week. #trusttheprocess
Nah bro. U didnt waste an entire year. You tried, learned and found out there was another and cheaper way to do stuff. How would you else learn?
I like supporting new start ups and seems like your doing a great job.
I'ma use your service soon!.
 
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