Tube sites operation revealed :: My new year gift to you
 

Happy new year to all. This is my new year present to all of you.

In this thread I will explain you how a sucessfull tube site is ran and will detail you all the costs. Unlike you may think, the costs are much less than starting a paysite and at the moment they are more profitable.
This is about a real tube like youporn.com and not some pseudo tube running a sponsor feeded crap.

First of all, to run a tube site you need lots of bandwidth and a custom made CMS. You don't need lots of servers, but it all depends on how much bw you have per server. This is the "hardest" part to get because we all know that servers and bw cost alot... WRONG.
Negotiating at datacenter level skipping the hosting comany or reseller drops the prices to near $2500 per 1 Gbit of unmetered line. Some of you pay near $2000 for 100 Mbit unmetered servers. The catch is that the datacenter will require a long term contract (one year or so) guaranteing you will burn at least 1 - 5 Gbit/sec nonstop. Some datacenters may even give you the bw for free as long as you maintain data flow rates with given countries or providers.

How does the datacenter profit from that?
Datacenters have peerings with bw carriers. Some big carriers require BIG amounts of data flow to make direct peering with you. For example, some euro countries main carriers require a minimum of 4 - 10 Gbit traffic with them to make direct peering with a datacenter directly.
Having direct peering in a datacenter with some country main carrier means only one thing for that datacenter. They can get BIG company clients from that country that pay the big money. So they are more than happy to give $50.000 worth of traffic to a tube site owner for free as long as he guarantees a traffic flow for direct peering with some carriers that allows them to get 10 clients paying $350.000 each one ($3.450.000 profit for the datacenter from this operation).

Servers can be rented or bought, the price for one - two years operative is practically the same. Of course, when you buy or lease 50 - 100 servers from Dell or HP prices get ridiculously low. Since the BW is free or almost free servers are also not a problem.

For now, assuming you have to pay the bw and the servers, a 1 Gbit burning tube site with about 500 - 1.000 GB worth of content would cost between $1.000 and $4.000 per month as much in server expenses.

Now time comes for the content encoding. You can compile ffmpeg with flv support and tune it with a good UNIX nice priority, so the content can be encoded on every server without distrbing the web servervice operation. This saves you lots of money and admin time in running separate servers for encoding the content.
I personally use other content encoding solution, but it's because I don't like ffmpeg. Mine is paid, so it costs a bit in software licenses.

Now the content costs. Most of you think content may cost alot. I suggest you to visit Venus instead of the big Bro shows this year. You can license content with Internet rights at really good prices there. One of my coworkers licensed 150 asian DVDs for 1 euro per title (about 1 dollar and 40 cents). They are putting these titles on the local TVs at the moment.
As long as you produce or buy content in bulk the prices drop alot.
Of course, some tubes steal the content, but most of the time it's not worth to do it because downloading time costs (the action of stealing the content) costs more money in time consumed than licensing the content directly from the producer. Since content exclusivity is not mandatory for a tube site, the prices can go really low. Populating a tube site with 200 - 500 full DVD titles may cost between $1.500 and $10.000 depending on niche and quality. Of course, in this case you must completely skip the reseller and deal directly with the producer or the main reseller at least.

Now comes the CMS stuff. You will need a custom coded one that can cluster the content between different servers and manage server failures when some server goes down, so your site can handle graciously server hardware or software failures. A good coded CMS will give you a very robust cluster that could even handle an entire datacenter failure if it's spread between two or more datacenters. This stability is not possible to achieve with a normal paysite because the servers costs would be not worth it unless it's a very big paysite.
A good coder could make you such a CMS between $5.000 and $10.000. It can be coded in 3 days. I coded mine in less than a day and had another day of planning all the possible failure points and ways to work around them (2 days of work in total).

So, the startup costs are the following:
$10.000 for CMS
$10.000 for content
$3.000 for bandwidth and servers

Then it's about $3.000 per month while driving a several million uniques/day. If the datacenter gives you the bw for free, then you only have to face the CMS and the content costs.

The maintainance of a tube site is practically nothing if your CMS handles server failures properly. As long as it can handle 20% of your servers being shutdown without disrupting operation it's ok. With 30 servers a tube cluster can encode between 40 and 80 DVDs per day, so content encoding is not a problem at all. With a good data replication protocol the same content would be spread between at least 4 servers, so server failure or bw saturation would not be a problem at all.

The startup cost of a 100% legal tube site would be in this case about a month of work and $25.000 if you have enough traffic to feed it from day one to burn about 1 Gbit of line and want to have lots of content on it. You can start a small one for less than $5.000.

Is it worth it? Yes, it is.
How do I know it? I run two such tube sites.

How is this traffic monetized?

It converts relatively good, for some things, better than TGP traffic or even blogs. If you run a subsidiary network of your own sites you can use data mining techniques to create a BIG user database that can be sold later for millions or used for targeted advertisement on audiences.

Some other day I will tell you how to produce exclusive or semi exclusive content at really low cost or no cost at all.

Happy new year :)

That's one hell of a writeup...

Here s a Post!

now back on job :)

wow very interesting thank you:)

Once a thief, always a thief.

Damn....

1 day to code a solid CMS? Where have I been going wrong...

It's a decent write up but not for Joe Blow with $1,000 which is what most of these GFYers are if even that lol

You had me up until here.

happy new years to ya too
thanks for the gift but i'm not sure many people will be happy with this lol

Find me this group of GFYers with that cash and I will provide you the vehicle to drive them around. A Smart ForTwo should cover the seating.

pretty good post, but most gfy's dont have $1000 to invest let alone $10k-$50k... :2 cents:

Indeed... and even that seems like a lot. I have trailer park fees to pay! :helpme
After all, money is something we get from our fast-paced careers at Burger King... GFY is just where we go to overcompensate for our sexual and social inadequacies. :upsidedow :1orglaugh


original post = interesting read! :thumbsup

LOL....so true.:thumbsup

Thank you for taking the time to write that up, I think you opened alot of eyes around here in regards to how a proper tube site runs.

Happy new years!

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Thanks.
But i think you got your prices/costs a bit wrong.

Kal, you're still the smartest fucker I know. :1orglaugh

After all those expenses you still need traffic. Following your how-to I can build a 50K cluster with no visitors :) . It would be great if you explain where to get the traffic for a 30 servers cluster, which is what actually will make money. Anyway, interesting reading for sure :thumbsup

Let's see how many tubes with hundreds or thousands of full length dvd titles all for free pop up after this. :(

Call me I have tube feeder traffic out the wazoo to help you build up the site. :thumbsup

Happy New Year !!

Sweet post, was just looking into tubes.

Have a great new year

I read it on GFY so it must be true..


...Very noble effort with your post, it's well intentioned and gives good advice in some areas. However, it is materially inaccurate regarding the data center component, peering, paid transit and server pricing. You're going in the right direction here but some of your assumptions or rationale are inaccurate or incorrect.

DH, you skimmed the post.

The overall theme here is correct and you efforts very good. The barrier to entry on starting a legal tube site with servers, bandwidth, content, scripting is all very doable and perhaps not as high as everyone thinks.

Happy New Year

Brad

hahahahah, 1/2 day tops quantum:thumbsup

I assume you manage your own servers. In my case, one of my companies specializes in high traffic and fault tolerance cluster hosting, so the admin costs are zero.

I have stripped completely the admin costs. But since you run a hosting company you already should know how low are nowadays hardware prices when renting or paying it during 24 months. You already know the bw prices too when buying volume.

Since you don't operate in Europe you have no way to know that OVH (France) or Telefonica (Spain) require 4 Gbit of constant (non peak) traffic to open a direct peering with a datacenter.

Good write up. Although the startup still seems a little high unless you are buying the highest quality content you can get your hands on. In which case good on ya.

buying all the content yeah I believe that. lol

Nice writup, interesting read. I too think your startup costs are high, but you bring out the fact that if you are going to do it right, you have to invest.

Thanks:thumbsup

.

interesting post

That's not that hard to believe Tony. Every studio in porn valley has had their content for sale for a few years now. It's pretty cheap to buy their entire catalogs and rip the DVD's down. Deluxe Pass and Porn Access are two good examples of that. It's a lot easier and a lot cheaper than having to constantly put up with DMCA and legal b.s. :2 cents:

Very good read... Gives me hope that my new tubes will do well...

Once a thief always a thief. I think everyone has forgotten that this fuckwad stole my code to make his trade script and bragged about it. Galaxycash? LOL, so you graduated from being a two bit thief eh? Powercum you are still the lowest of the lowest scumbags, karma has not caught up with you yet I see. It will sooner or later. Now show us oh wise thief and scumbag what tube sites you own. I'm willing to bet they are using stolen videos, you are afterall a thief.

Not every studio :upsidedow

No doubt, you had me until the CMS bit... 1 day to code a solid bug free, good to go from the start, CMS that would cost $10k? I'm pretty sure if you can do that, you'd make a lot more from doing free lance programming then building a tube site.. $10k a day, that's $300k a month, $3,650,000 a year.. I'm pretty sure your tube site wouldn't pull in quite that much...

You'd be a super coder and would most likely get snapped up by some highly ridiculous paying job that would trump even the $3,650,000/year salary...

I call shenanigans on this whole post.

I do know about hardware, bandwidth and peering in the states and in Europe.

Data centers don't do peering themselves nor do any of them sell bandwidth as they by definition are not carriers with any network. Data centers are merely the entity that facilitates a location and often a shared network fabric where peering takes place (such as AMS-IX, DE-CIX, NOTA, PAIX, Equinix sites). Worthwhile "eyeball" networks such as Comcast, ATT, Deutsche Telekom, etc do have strict peering requirements that not only require partners to be in multiple global locations and pass significant traffic in each one, but also have a balanced exchange of inbound and outbound traffic which by definition hosters or content networks don't have since 95% of their traffic flows outbound.

Brad

Correct me if I am wrong, In peering you get prefered treatment if you pull traffic and not push. For example if you want to peer with Comcast you need to maintain 1 to 1 ratio (or close to that).

I worked on a search engin indexing project where the servers pulled about 1 GB / Sec but only pushed about 200 megs. The ISP only charged the client for the 200 meg

Jay

cool cheers, good article

So by your logic your helping the datacenter by pushing traffic to their peers so they can get a peering agreement they wouldnt otherwise get - how are they going to measure that? Unless they are doing some serious route analysis and breaking down your charges by the routes they take - which i cant see someone doing for as little as 1GIG.

The real question here:

Can the sales of the website trump the cost of the bandwidth + the amortized cost of your deprecated investments + your time + your business costs (legal fees etc).