With the kids heading back to school comes the return of Proxy Season. I ventured into operating web proxies a couple of years ago and have had moderate success. Due to the arrangements I’ve made the operation is quite passive, requiring very little time on my part, the advertising revenue just gets deposited into the bank each month.

I am only actively utilizing one proxy, Unblock YouTube, which ranks #1 in Google for the term and generates thousands of unique homepage views each and everyday and tens of thousands of surfing page impressions. I have had to limit the geographic location of users that can access the site because of its popularity. Currently only users from the US, Canada, and Europe can access the site. I have considered setting up a database to change the advertising displayed based on the location of the user but I just don’t want to do the work when I can just profit from the tier one countries. Why chase after peanuts when the real advertising money comes from the above mentioned countries.

Web proxies are used to bypass filtering services utilized by schools, businesses and parents in order to access the entire web. This site is geared toward streaming YouTube videos which are usually blocked at work or school. The bandwidth required for such use is high and that’s why very few proxies allow video streaming, but I do. I am able to run the entire thing using a proxy host and being locked into a low cost $25/month plan that blows away the competition.

The revenue generated from Unblock YouTube is now exclusively through Google Adsense, although I did used to bring in money from popups, popunders and interstitials, however that income source had been declining steadily and it disrupted the user experience so I eliminated it completely about a month ago.

My other web proxy, MySpace Unblock It, is a work in progress. I would like to get it ranked #1 for the term “Unblock MySpace”, but have not been very successful as it is a highly competitive keyword and the script programming required to allow proxy surfing through MySpace is intense.

[tags]youtube, myspace, web proxy, surfing, filter, unblock, proxy[/tags]