Making money on a URL shortener site?

Many years ago I created a URL shortener that gained some popularity and I made some good money with AdSense until one day when it stopped showing ads. After a few weeks I tried Chitika but 560 244 impressions just gave me $1 so I removed it and went ad free. Today I logged in to my old analytics account and noticed that the site is still getting 4-6000 unique daily visitors with one peak right below 100 000 visitors in a day.

Surely it must be possible to make some money? I've searched around and found one recommendation of adding my own affiliate ID to sites like Amazon but it's mostly low value links with only a handful of those kind of sites. Any ideas?

4-6k daily visitors is nothing if you want to make decent money. Your best bet would be to keep pushing until you get more traffic and then split test using different networks to see what works best with your type of traffic

4000-6000 visitors a day with a peak of 100,000 visitors a day? I wonder what caused that surge in traffic.

Anyway, back when the site I'm bringing up was new, I used a URL shortener called Adfly for one of the links to download a product on the site. Since the site was new and had very little traffic, I only received 25 views and 6 cents as a result. Now, assuming every 4.1666 views equals 1 cent, you could make a minimum of $9.60 a day and a maximum of $14.40 a day.

There are better ways to make use of that traffic. Take a look at Commission Junction or another affiliate network like eXampL suggested.

Sell ad space with BuySellAds
https://buysellads.com/publishers

eXampL said:

4-6k daily visitors is nothing if you want to make decent money.

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Sure. I'm mostly interested in covering the expenses so I don't lose money on it.

Zwielicht said:

4000-6000 visitors a day with a peak of 100,000 visitors a day? I wonder what caused that surge in traffic.

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I agree. Unfortunately Google Analytics just says "social media". The most visited URL redirected to a porn video and the other top four was leading to a domain that isn't active any longer. I'm guessing someone used it to spam.

Zwielicht said:

Anyway, back when the site I'm bringing up was new, I used a URL shortener called Adfly for one of the links to download a product on the site. Since the site was new and had very little traffic, I only received 25 views and 6 cents as a result. Now, assuming every 4.1666 views equals 1 cent, you could make a minimum of $9.60 a day and a maximum of $14.40 a day.

There are better ways to make use of that traffic. Take a look at Commission Junction or another affiliate network like eXampL suggested.

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I've always used adblocker on Adfly but the layout is pretty clever with the ad page opening below. I'm guessing it isn't allowed to open a site like Amazon which would insert the cookie. Really tempting though.

W130SN said:

Sell ad space with BuySellAds
https://buysellads.com/publishers

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Will have a closer look at that. Thanks.

mate99 said:

I agree. Unfortunately Google Analytics just says "social media". The most visited URL redirected to a porn video and the other top four was leading to a domain that isn't active any longer. I'm guessing someone used it to spam.

I've always used adblocker on Adfly but the layout is pretty clever with the ad page opening below. I'm guessing it isn't allowed to open a site like Amazon which would insert the cookie. Really tempting though.

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Wait, if someone used the site to spam, did you recover the site and secure it from any future attacks?

I would definfitly go with a PPI fake missing plugin toolbar. That's your best shot at making money with that few traffic

Zwielicht said:

Wait, if someone used the site to spam, did you recover the site and secure it from any future attacks?

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I apologise. What I meant was that someone used my tool to manually shorten their URL. Then they spammed social media by publishing plenty of comments containing the shortened URL. That's my guess anyway since I can't check it. Analytics just says that a ton of traffic came from social media and visited a shortened URL that pointed towards a porn video.