Okay, as I’ve been in streaming pretty much my whole life, and a lot of people keep asking me if streaming sites still work in 2026, I decided to write a small tutorial that even noobs can follow my old tutorial is had a lot of attention few years ago but it's lost somewhere.
First and most important is protection. If you plan to seriously work with this, you need 100% protection from the start, so a VPN is a must. The best VPN I can highly recommend is VP.net, but you can use others like Nord, etc. The best solution is to use, for example, VP.net on your PC and NordVPN inside your browser as an extension.
After that, if possible in your country, buy crypto without KYC. I always use P2P transactions. You will need crypto to buy domains, hosting, SEO, AI models, etc. For everything related to your site, use crypto. If a service doesn’t offer crypto as a payment option, you can use VCCpro or some other similar service to convert crypto into a virtual credit card.
Nowadays, it’s very easy to build a streaming site from scratch using AI coding. Even as a noob you can do it, and even extremely good programmers should use it to save time.
If you don’t want to spend time doing that and setting up hosting, etc., there is a site called vidapi.ru where you can generate awesome sites in a few clicks. This service was running behind other brands before, but it was only a player. Now they have a lot of features. I was using them as a second source on my sites after vidsrc, which everybody knows, and half of streaming sites use their servers—they just don’t really care about the user interface. I always wanted to start my own streaming player, but it’s too much without a team, and the cost to start is huge, so it’s much better to use third-party streaming servers.
Because this is my full-time job, my strategy works like this: I buy around 50 domains per month and release up to 10 sites every day. Every 3 sites use the fmovies theme, 3 use 123movies, 3 use soap2day, etc. I only do SEO on about 5 sites per month. Right now I can’t reveal my backlink sources, but for each site I just build 5–10 very strong backlinks. The sites may not rank in 1st place, but I aim to rank them for keywords like when someone searches on Google “watch the dark knight 123movies” to be there. These sites burn fast, but they can make you, for example, $5k–$10k and then disappear.
And this is why I started working more with vidapi. As I mentioned before, they have a site generator where you can just connect your domain to their platform and get a live streaming site in under 3 minutes. The most important thing is that you can rank those sites pretty fast because every single movie, episode, and TV show plot, as well as actor bios, have unique content. They don’t use TMDB text like most sites do. Every site generated there has a different ID, sitemap, etc. A few years ago we were all using the psyplay theme, which ranked with great success, and this works in a similar way. I started 10 sites on their platform during beta testing 2 months ago, and 3 of them already have over 20–30k daily traffic. It’s not huge, but this is completely without SEO. Right now they have 8 themes, and I’m in touch with the owner daily. They are working on more themes, and I told him to introduce their service on BHW, so maybe soon there will be an official vidapi thread.
Anyway, if you want to host your own streaming site, it should work like this: make the index page look like a search engine so it can’t be easily removed from Google because of DMCA (they usually just penalize URLs where movies are). The second page will be the actual homepage, where there will be sliders with latest movies, episodes, TV shows, etc.
About ranking, if you want to build your own brand, it will take a lot more time, but users will remember your domain and keep coming back if the site is good. I prefer copycat keyword ranking like fmovies, cineby, 123movies, etc. It’s much faster to start earning, but competition is huge.
Always build a sitemap and make sure your movie pages are structured with schema.org. Titles should be like: “Watch Scarface 1983 online free | Sitename”. You can check examples from any site that ranks first on Google for top keywords.
For movie sources, as I said, vidsrc, vidapi, or any other similar service. There are many, and most of them use the same base sources anyway (often from hdtoday), and sometimes they stop working when they get blocked.
About ads, right now the best ones I can recommend (and yeah, they all steal, so don’t complain about any of them ) are Galaksion, Adcash, Monetag, and Adsterra. Always receive payments in crypto.
For anything you’re interested in, feel free to ask and I’ll try to help.
