How do movie streaming websites make money?

chocolateman said:

I'm sorry for the newbie question, but my concern rises from the posts I saw about people who do similar websites. Firstly, from looking at other movie streaming websites, and I noticed the main ways they make money is by putting popups when you press the play button, but I found out from my website that thats actually from the API and the person who created the API is the one who makes money. The second way which is the way people seem to be using is by putting offers (I believe pay per click) on buttons that say "Stream now" and "Download". Of course these buttons don't actually work and only give the website owner money. Here is my concern, if the buttons are the only way of making money then let's do some math. Let's say I get 1000 visitors and of these thousand 10 fall for it, and I get 0.50$ per click, a generous assumption, then id make 5$. Which is a good amount to me, but this create 2 issues. How are people making $1k+ doing the same thing on small sites and the second issue is a lot of users are recycled. In other words, if these 10 users stay on my website then they found the button to stream the movie correctly, so if they go to a second movie they wont fall for the same thing again, so I won't make money off of them, and in any circumstance why would should I only be making money off of the naive set of people when I can probably be making money off of everyone.

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SunnyLeon said:

You don't make money from 10 users that keep watching. You make money from millions of visitors monthly that are bombarded with pop ups and out of which, thousands click on the download button.

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ensus said:

Yeah even the player itself, has an eventListener where you push play, triggers a popup KA CHING!
But obviously not a lot of people can sit through a 3 hour movie, so a lot of the time people pause and come back, and you have the play button waiting to be pressed again...

I've noticed though, a lot of these stream sites offer their player with the movies/tvshows for distribution or other streaming sites, because their player embeded on your site, makes them money from the internal ads of the player.

For example, when you select a different "mirror", notice 9 times out of 10 that the player changes design and has its own advertising, so a lot of the time, you could be one streaming site, that has free advertising on thousands of others

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Mathew Guest Post said:

everything depends on Backlinks, Traffic, and authority
make backlinks

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chocolateman said:

I don't think I fully understand this. I believe you're saying that since people get tired of seeing all these pop ups, so they decide to download, but I just wanted to confirm and thats definitely a solid point that I overlooked.

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chocolateman said:

I'm sorry for the newbie question, but my concern rises from the posts I saw about people who do similar websites. Firstly, from looking at other movie streaming websites, and I noticed the main ways they make money is by putting popups when you press the play button, but I found out from my website that thats actually from the API and the person who created the API is the one who makes money. The second way which is the way people seem to be using is by putting offers (I believe pay per click) on buttons that say "Stream now" and "Download". Of course these buttons don't actually work and only give the website owner money. Here is my concern, if the buttons are the only way of making money then let's do some math. Let's say I get 1000 visitors and of these thousand 10 fall for it, and I get 0.50$ per click, a generous assumption, then id make 5$. Which is a good amount to me, but this create 2 issues. How are people making $1k+ doing the same thing on small sites and the second issue is a lot of users are recycled. In other words, if these 10 users stay on my website then they found the button to stream the movie correctly, so if they go to a second movie they wont fall for the same thing again, so I won't make money off of them, and in any circumstance why would should I only be making money off of the naive set of people when I can probably be making money off of everyone.

Click to expand...