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Add me on SphinnAlright enough Q&A’s (although I do want to get through all of them) and vacation posts…it’s time for some money-making content.
This post wasn’t actually in my agenda, but I’m squeezing it in as I just kind of stumbled over it and found it interesting. I was browsing YouTube, and found a site that is possibly cashing in on hundreds of thousands of free impressions. I was on vacation yesterday and missed American Idol which I like to watch (I love music and play the drums), so I was watching some of the performers on last night’s episode when I stumbled upon the user RealIdolFans. It was pretty obvious what caught my eye, here’s a screenshot of the very beginning (and end) of the video :
Basically it’s an ad telling users that they can get their American Idol ringtones at IdolRings.com. If you go to Idol Rings you can see it’s just a rip of a basic ringtone landing page, they just altered the graphics a little bit to make it look like it’s IdolRings’ custom website.
When the video of the show actually starts, they have a little Idol looking watermark thing in the bottom corner of the video. Their ad is showing during the entire video, and almost looks like it’s a part of the show.
They also have a link to the landing page in the first line of the video description.
I looked in a little further and checked out the profile of RealIdolFans and saw the following information :
RealIdolFans joined just 1 day ago, but in that day has watched almost 1,100 videos. Now either this person is a REAL YouTube addict, or they had some automated script go through and watch 1,000 movies to make their profile look credible.
After one day, this person already has over 50 video subscribers, and around 10,000 views per video (most have over 10k, one of them has over 50k views in less than 24 hours). With every new week, subscribers for RealIdolFans should jump up as well as video views. This person has found a way to get thousands of ringtone clicks at no cost (aside from taking time to upload all the videos). Do I have any idea if they’re even making money with it? No, but I’m sure they’ve done at least a few leads.
Moral of this story…once again think outside the box when it comes to affiliate marketing! There are plenty of other ways to make money on affiliate programs aside from just PPC landing pages. This person is exploiting the millions of YouTube views every day by building a follow-ship and then using it to sell ringtones to the perfect target audience.
April 16th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Nice article. bloggers should not only focus PPC as you said there are other many ways to earn money online
April 16th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Good stuff. Would be intersting to see how much they are actually making. I guess there are lines between what is illegal and who can catch you and stop you from getting paid.
BTW, Paul, did you steal your site design from shudogg?
April 16th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Yeah funny. I paid over $1,000 for my theme, he obv ripped it from me and it’ll be taken down soon.
April 16th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Selling ads are against the YouTube TOS
Also you can’t upload copyrighted content. Expect Fox to DCMA his account, ESPECIALLY since they put ads on.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Good stuff…that is absolutely a very cool way of making money and besides, if people know how much them guys are making from youtube then it wont take up to 2 months it would be over crowded….people love free stuffs!
April 16th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
This guy must have just opened this particular account because he was doing this early using the exact same setup but I saw the videos weeks ago because a few of them hit the daily top list.
I wonder if he’s just duplicating his efforts under a new account or the old one was deleted.
April 16th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
His account was probably deleted.
April 17th, 2008 at 8:30 am
whjch of his accounts was deleted? the youtube account or affiliate account?
April 17th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Why would his aff network delete his account? Because they’re making loads of money through him? Yeah, don’t think it’s happening. It’s the legal side of this that would get his Youtube account shut down.
Your question is pertinent though; If we’re going to stop copyright violations like this, we have to follow the money. Hence cases like Vulcan Golf v Google in Trademark; if Vulcan wins there, expect Google to get sued for all the scrapers still monetizing with adsense.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Great Post but how do you get the video off the tv?? LOL…Seriously though…how? I would love to learn this technique.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
@Aniston u could do this…http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=american+idol That’s all I’m saying
April 17th, 2008 at 1:35 am
Time to try this method myself with my own twist
April 17th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Hi,
Once again, great post Paul. However, this method is already well-known. When it comes to YouTube, your imagination is the limit. You can even promote the ZangoCrap with those creative methods. And it doesn’t need to be American Idol stuff. It could be whatever is being searched on the net. You even can record some videos on camtasia if you want to promote some geeks stuff.
However, I found this method much less profitable than the classic PPC. Maybe you don’t pay on the traffic, but the cash you make is compared to it. So, currently I personally do only PPC, but I’m trying to develop some system that all this stuff will be outsourced.
Enjoy…
April 17th, 2008 at 6:36 am
Question:
How do you insert the ad’s into the video’s and is that legal? I’d really appreciate a technical answer to this question.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Good post Paul.. hmm that’s a very smart move from that guy doing this.. Doing something about the latest buzz definitely helps you get leads…
April 17th, 2008 at 10:07 am
I really do appreciate this information. But doesn’t seem it hypocritical that you wont even show us one of your own expired landing pages, yet you completely exposed this guys hustle.
Once again i do appreciate this share greatly. I’m just imagining if i was this guy and i found your blog and found my enter site and strategy completely laid out for copycatting while the author of the blog will not even show his readers a simple screen shot of an landing page that isn’t even in use any longer.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:19 am
wow, this post looks familiar
April 17th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
lol cakes you posted this like forever ago
April 17th, 2008 at 11:17 am
MenAreBetterThanWomen.com Bitch!
April 17th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
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April 17th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
hahahahahaha i love these kinda fights….it makes me lmao hahahahahahahahahaha !
April 17th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Nice idea but I’d be very cautious, what this guy is doing is obviously illegal.
April 17th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I have been doing this for a quite a long time now check out my YouTube profile http://www.youtube.com/disneyfanclub trust me it doesn’t help that much.
April 17th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Question:
What keyword research tools do you guys use? and how do you go about finding stuff to sell?
is wordze any good?
April 17th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
pretty cool, I do something similar using entertainment. already have over 10 millions views, and constant 40 double opti - ins per day since last october. Youtube is really useful in terms of getting traffic.
April 17th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Great post! :) Nice job.
April 18th, 2008 at 1:41 am
ancient.
btw. you spent over $1000 for this theme.. are you joking?
LOL!
April 18th, 2008 at 6:14 am
Never a good idea to put copyrighted material in your videos. This technique is not worth the risk. Do something creative, make videos reviewing the contestants and then promote the ringtones. To get all the views, he’s probably just loading that page as a popunder somewhere on one of those chessy popunder networks for $.0001 per pop.
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:49 am
[...] Geld verdienen mit YouTube - spannende Idee! [...]
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Clever stuff. Thinking outside the box - always gonna make you money.
June 28th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Done this and made around $500 with Clickbank.
By doing this you generate free leads, but most of the traffic is obviously low quality. So yes, you can make money but to make a good figure you need a lot of videos or a few great videos that reach a large audience, and creating those videos takes a lot of time and creativity - so if you have those too go ahead, but if you don´t you´ll end up infringing copyright laws or being flagged by the youtube community for spam or some related reason.
SO BE CREATIVE AND GOOD LUCK!