Monetizing School Proxy Users

The rationale of getting catchy and easy to remember domain names will not work to woo new school proxy visitors. You can also forget about trying to do search engine optimization (SEO) when you are trying to get student and office proxy users. Even if you are ranked at the top of the search engine results when these people search for "unblock myspace", they are unable to access your web proxy site because it is already blocked and blacklisted by the their web filter unless you are using a special stealthy proxy script. I am not saying it is useless to rank well in the search engines, but definitely not for gaining "bypass" traffic. Some proxy webmasters also suggest not to use domain names with the word "proxy" in it, such as thebestproxyever dot com. Similarly, avoid mentioning the words "proxy", "unblock", "anonymous", etc in the web pages. These can be easily picked up by web content filters and label your site as 99% a web proxy that should be automatically blocked as well. If you are using google Adsense to monetize your web proxy and you do not have the word proxy in your domain name, you may not get targeted advertisements to show up. For example, if you are the new proxy owner of ProxyAndMoreProxy dot com and you have two 336 by 280 Adsense text advertisement blocks plus two Adsense 468 by 15 link advertisements on your site, this is whats going to happen. You will get targeted ads showing up for the 468 by 15 links. Because your site is a web proxy, targeted ads in this case will be on proxy related stuff. You should see something like "Youtube Proxy", "Free Proxy List", "Web Proxy Servers", "Anonymous Proxy IP", "Phproxy", etc showing up. My experience is that 468 by 15 links get a lot of clicks, several times more than the 336 by 280 text ads. However, each click on average is only about $0.05. It is up to you whether you want them or not. I did because despite their low value per click, they more than made it up in terms of numbers. They typically form 60% of my overall Adsense earnings for proxy websites. Some of you may ask that if we remove these link ads and only show the large rectangular text ads, will results be better? There is the worry that the low value link ads may cannibalize potential earnings that can be made from the expected higher values ads shown in the large 336 by 280 Adsense rect blocks. As you may already know, once a proxy visitor clicks on any Adsense ads, they may leave your site and be brought to the advertiser's sites. The visitors are very unlikely to click backspace and return to your site such that they can click on another ad. Fat hope for it to happen, but when it does, you better be prepared to face fraud click charges. Somebody may be trying to help or harm you by clicking ads on your web proxy. Anyway, back to the question on link ads eating to the profits of text block ads. This may or may not be true. Let me explain this from my experience. There are not many Adwords advertisers that are gunning for proxy related keywords and have their ads shown on the content network, which is on third party publisher sites like mine and yours. They may prefer to have their ads shown only for Google's earch pages. Thus, you may find that there are no ads being shown in the 336 by 280 ad blocks most of the time. You can try this by putting one 468 by 15 link ad and one 336 by 280 rect block on your proxy webpage and track them exclusively with separate Adsense channels. After a few days, login to your Adsense account and look at the number of impressions for these two channels/ad types. You will see that there are many more impressions for the link ad. The more times an ad is shown, the more times it can be clicked on and make money for you, provided all things are equal. So why does the link ad always have ads to be shown? Because those are linked to a google search page. When a proxy site visitor clicks on a keyword link in the 468 by 15 link ad, he or she will be redirected onto a page containing search results for that keyword. At this point, you do not earn anything yet. Only when the visitor clicks a second time on any of those search results will the visitor be redirected to the advertiser's site and you get paid. Sometimes there are $1 plus clicks coming from link ads. Rare but they do show up every now and then. I suspect we get less money per click from link ads because google takes a larger share of the advertisers' dollars here, but what do I know? If you are still not convinced about the viability of using link ads, just go ahead and do some split testing of your own. Set up the Adsense tracking channels properly and then start switching between templates containing both link ads and text blocks versus those having just one large text rect. You can easily write a php script for this task; if you still do not know some simple php, learn or team up with someone who does. I seriously tell you that you are wasting your hard earned traffic by not split testing and fine tuning your monetizing strategies for your proxy websites.

When you choose to avoid using the proxy related keywords in your domain name and in your web content, Adsense does not really know what type of ads to show on your web proxy initially. You may end up with nonprofit public service ads where all clicks earn something for charity and not you. You may get advertisements showing up that is totally non related to proxy. For example, if you are the owner of BypassEverything dot com, you may get surgical and heart operation ads. Yes, theoretically these are going to pay much more compared to youtube proxy ads. However, google may only pay you $0.01 a click for such ads which are rumored to bring in $10 a click. Why you may ask? Because google do not really think your website is everything about bypass operations, so they may decide that clicks are going to be flukes and will not to pay you your fair share unless you really are a health related site. Whether they charge the advertisers a full $10 while paying you $0.01 for a non-related click, nobody except them knows the whole story. Even if you get a $5 click on your first day of running BypassEverything dot com proxy, things are not likely to repeat on the second day and thereafter. In fact, you are likely to find that there are no more ads being shown on your website. Google seems to pay more attention to high value clicks and where such clicks are being generated. Just imagine a Google employee coming over to look at your site when a visitor clicks on a $5 bypass surgery ad. When all he sees are bypass this websense and bypass that filter, he can label your site as a proxy and no more medical related ads for you. You may still get proxy related ads, but if your site and domain name both do not contain proxy keywords, then most of the time you get nothing, no ads at all.

It is not accurate trying to view your site with the same computer where you access your Adsense account with. Somehow google will always show you ads because they know the web proxy owner is viewing the proxy site themselves. Try visiting your proxy url using a proxy belonging to somebody else and you will see what normal visitors to your proxy sites are seeing.

Yes, there is a way to trap a lot of high paying but unrelated clicks by using web proxies and another method. Because proxy websites easily get lots of traffic, some blackhat webmasters use this method to profit fast. By the second day, they will have no use for that proxy website and its domain name. Thus, they need a lot of cheap domain names in order to carry this out but they can get away with very cheap proxy hosting plans. I decided not to say out the name of that method, but most of you should be able to put two and two together.

Comparison On The Different Open Source Proxy Server Scripts

Do you know which freely available open source proxy scripts you should be using for your new free proxy websites? If you try searching for an answer via Google, you are not likely to get what you want. All search results are probably listings of proxy websites – not very useful huh? Try looking at proxy forums and you get 50/50 opinions and plugs from advocates of the different proxy camps. Some of these information you dug out online are probably going to be outdated anyway and maybe provided by the sincere but misinformed. What we have compiled are information we have derived from our own experience of running anonymous web proxies throughout 2007-2008, not very long compared to other proxy owners that started out since the birth of the Internet, but there has been a lot of new developments in these two years and we have dipped our fingers in nearly all. We are going to compare the four big open source proxy scripts: CGI, PHP, Glype and Zelune. If you still do not know it by now, there is really no need to pay for a proxy script especially when you are just starting out. These four are nearly sufficient for 90% of all web proxy users. If you are thinking about paying for some neat add on functionalities that are missing from these four free proxies, ask yourself if paying for these 10% visitors are providing sufficient payback for you. Are you really in the business of unblocking websites and bypass filters for others? Is the anonymous surfing experience for others really your top concerns? The following is going to be a boring read, so if you want our recommendations directly, download CGI proxy if you have a dedicated proxy server costing $200 monthly or download Glype if you have a shared proxy hosting plan costing $10 a month. Read on if you really have time to waste and rather not promote your proxy and improve earnings…

The CGI proxy script by James Marshall is the pioneer of all subsequent proxy scripts. The first thing to take note is that it uses a lot of CPU and RAM resources such that you can only use it on your own dedicated server hosting plans. All hosting companies, including those that specialized in proxy hosting refuse to allow the CGI proxy scripts to be used on any shared hosting plans and even on more expensive VPS plans as well. The good things about the CGI Proxy are plenty though. Firstly, it is still actively supported by its author James Marshall and works nearly perfectly with most websites today. Having active support is important because sometimes changes are being made to your favorite Myspace or Orkut which disrupts the proper viewing with proxy scripts. When such a problem arises, the script developer can quickly troubleshoot and release a patch to resolve problems with viewing a particular website through the proxy script. The latest version 2.1 already provides full Javascript and nearly complete Adobe Flash player support. That means you have no problems view websites that uses a lot of Javascript and AJAX to implement user interfaces, such as Facebook. You can also view websites such as Youtube that embeds a lot of Flash videos. Although this is not really important anymore, some proxy webmasters may have bought into dedicated server hosting plans that have a bandwidth limit and excess bandwidth charges over your quota are very costly. The good news is that the CGI proxy script uses much less bandwidth compared to any other scripts such as PHProxy, PHPhantom, Glype etc.

The PHProxy script is the most popular among proxy webmasters and nearly 70% of all online web proxies are running this script. Although it has been officially discontinued by its original creator Abdullah Arif since July 2007, the latest version 0.5 has been downloaded 49,628 times from sourceforge. The number one reason for its popularity despite offering less functionalities compared to CGI Proxy, is that it uses much lesser CPU and RAM resources and hence can be hosted on ultra cheap shared hosting plans. A dedicated server with 4Gb RAM costs at least $200 monthly, a shared proxy hosting plan with 100Gb bandwidth costs around $8 monthly and a general shared hosting plan with so-called unlimited bandwidth costs around $3 monthly. Since there are many more beginner proxy webmasters compared to established proxy owners, these newbies tend to go for the lowest investments possible and take out the cheap shared hosting plans and can only use the PHProxy script. Another reason for its widespread usage is due to its simplicity. There is only a few lines of code to be ported in order to use the proxy script with any web templates. As such there are a lot of proxy templates sites around, and they offer a lot of free working templates plus PHProxy script bundles to be downloaded. For a beginner proxy webmaster, you only have to unzip the bundle and FTP upload everything to your hosting account. If you have bought several domain names for your proxy websites, you only have to download different template bundles from the proxy template sites. You only need to add in your Adsense account number in the configuration files; most other coding, design and scripting stuff have already been done for you. The downside to using PHProxy is that it uses a lot much more bandwidth compared to CGI proxy but since they are very hosting friendly (uses less CPU and RAM), a lot of proxy hosting providers sell very cheap shared proxy plans with a lot of bandwidth.

If you are going to start your foray into internet business today with minimal investments in running a proxy, your best bet is to use the glype proxy script since it is arguably the most well supported proxy script nowadays. This is important because frequent changes to some popular websites can cause page loading problems with existing proxy scripts. Having a large support base usually means fixes are being rolled out at a faster rate to please the many types of proxy visitors. Glype is designed to be configured and managed via its simple password protected content management system. It is quite easy to setup and there is usually no need to touch the source codes at all. This makes things slightly easier for individuals that feel the world is spinning the moment they see any programming languages. Unlike the combined methodology of PHProxy where the script and web themes are coupled together in two or three files, the core proxy script engine codes and the web design theme files are clearly separated. Although this makes proxy theme design slightly more difficult for the designers, things become very easy for proxy owners. You just need to upload a new proxy theme to the /theme folder and then activate the new theme from the Glype control panel. Glype is designed to support plugins that can extend its basic functionalities. For example, there are many new plugins designed to improve handling of websites such as playing video on youtube, sending chat messages on web messengers etc. Some of these plugins cost a licence fee, so do take note. The latest version of Glype has support for javascript and works with nearly all the functionalities for both Myspace and Facebook directly out of the box, so you do not need to pay for any new plugins if proxifying Myspace and Facebook is important for your anonymous proxy users. Most proxy webmasters have tested Glype and observed that it is considerably faster then PHPproxy. A fast unblocking proxy is likely to get more recurring anonymous proxy users. Glype can also do server-side caching to improve page loading speed and CPU/RAM resources for commonly requested web pages. By loading these pages from the locally stored copies, tour bandwidth bills will also be reduced, although you may need to have a fairly large disk space for benefits of Glype caching to show.

The Zelune proxy script is more or less discontinued. It is seldom used although it claims to use lesser bandwidth and RAM compared to PHProxy, the CPU usage is observed to be higher. Some proxy webmasters claimed because the Zelune proxy script is less well known and of a lower profile, they are less likely to be targeted by web filtering companies. Thus, they are able to remain unblocked and continued to be used by college students and office workers that need to actively bypass website filters and web blocking firewalls. Actually, Zelune will be reborn as the new PHPhantom proxy script. This new proxy server is still in the development works and not freely available for downloads. Some proxy webmasters have been selected to join in for beta testing – I remembered someone saying the current version is a bit slow in loading pages compared to Glype. However, this newcomer has a very distinct feature that excited a lot of proxy owners – the problem of getting new proxies unblocked and unfiltered. The creators are touting that PHPhantom main strength will be its stealth and cloaking functions to trick web filtering spiders and internet protection bots into thinking that any anonymous web proxies running the PHPhantom script is not a proxy website that should be filtered. This is probably done as in other web content cloaking techniques used by blackhat webmasters - showing parental control spiders and web blocking bots one modified version of the website while showing human users the real version. They are tracking the IPs of the servers used by web content filtering companies such as websense and either blocking their spiders from accessing or showing them something like wikipedia content pages. When the websense internet filter spider bot sees "calculus", "differential equations", and other innocent terms and topics, it will say "ok, the school students will need information from this website, so lets give them open access". If your free proxy websites are not blocked frequently, chances are you will get good recurring proxy traffic since students no longer need to look for proxy new servers to get school filters bypass.