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Avoiding The Garbage - Proxy Sites
By Max | June 19, 2007
Almost every day I will see someone trying to sell a proxy site. A proxy site allows people to surf any webpage they want from a location that may restrict internet access, like work or school. If you want to look at porn while at school, a proxy site is a good way to do it. 
There are a few problems with proxy sites.
#1. Resource Hogs
Because every page your user looks at has to be piped through your server, proxy sites will load a server a lot heavier than a similar content site with the same traffic volume. A lot of people advise running proxy sites on a different server than you run your content sites to reduce the impact to them. This isn’t such a big problem in itself that you should avoid proxy sites, its just something to be aware of. If you are making money, you’re making money. Using a shared hosting plan is probably not going to work for a proxy with decent traffic.
#2. Maintaining Traffic
A lot of proxy sites run the same backend software. This means that your site has 10,000 others just like it available on the internet. A proxy will have a lot of competition, which means grabbing a share of search traffic is going to be very difficult. You could find yourself promoting the proxy all over forums and blogs, just to drive new traffic to maintain revenues.
#3. Non-performing traffic
Due to the nature of a proxy, you will have a lot of repeat users. These users will get used to typing in your URL while they are at work, and they’ll keep coming back to use the service in the future. This may seem like a good thing, but any forum owner can tell you that repeat traffic rarely clicks on ads. A lot of similar ads are run on the same site, and eventually, the user becomes “ad-blind” to your site. In the case of community sites like forums, this repeat traffic can still be valuable because they’ll create content driving new traffic to the site or they’ll gain trust in you and become valuable when you market useful affiliate offers. In the case of the proxy user, though they are just leeching your bandwidth. Their use of the site doesn’t feedback to you at all.
Can you still make money with proxies? Sure. Many people are familiar with the pitfalls of proxy ownership, and thats why the sites sell for much less multiples than other content or community based sites. Many proxy sites sell for only 4-6 months of revenues.
My recommendation for site purchases though is to look for under monetized content sites. Those have the greatest chance of succeeding for you financially. Proxies don’t fit in too well with this strategy, so unless you have a very specific reason to purchase one (ie. insane good deal) then you should probably stay away.
Topics: Puchase Pitfalls |
June 19th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
It would be interesting (definitely unethical; probably illegal; maybe profitable) to start a proxy site with some code that detects google publisher numbers and replaces them with your own.
June 19th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Even better would be to release a browser that did the same thing. Maybe you could sneak it into the next Mozilla release.
June 19th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Okay guys, resist the dark side. We used to have problems with proxy sites at work until we installed Websense filtering. Its always funny when you get some hotshot new employee that says I’ll show you hot to get around the filter and the first thing they try to do is use a proxy site and it doesn’t work.
I would rather stick with more legit sites, but thanks for the info on how it could affect me if I had one.
June 20th, 2007 at 2:23 am
Yeah, you don’t want to waste time with a proxy site. There’s much better ways to invest your cash.
December 14th, 2007 at 8:58 am
do you any proxy sites i can get onto??