RIP: Proxies are now officially dead.

If you want to make money the easy way subscribe to my RSS feed, and learn how to make money from your feedreader.

It seems the last month and a half has been horrible for proxies. No one knows this better than me. I WAS pulling in close to $100 a day on my good days, and upto $40 on Sunday.

Buildup:

It was bound to happen, there were over 9,000 proxies listed at a Proxy.org. At this point in time it is at 5k. The list blew up over a 1 month time period.

The reason it happened is because the few people that were selling proxies had sold a few, now when you sell a site you have to show the stats, people were seeing stats with traffic increasing upto 500 visitors a day. And the sellers guranteed that you did not have to do anything as the traffic would continue to increase.

This is what got me into the proxy business, and when I started in December it was beautiful. Traffic was growing so fast from 1 site that my VPS was continually being shut down. I was making upto $80 a day from one site.

Than my adsense account got banned. Luckily I was able to get it back, but not everyone is that lucky.

With so many people getting interested, turnkey proxies started selling for as low as $10. People could buy one for $10 and start enjoying the benefits immediatly.

Blogs like mine started popping up, encourging people and showing the profits that could come! Hell last month I showed you all a screenshot of my adsense account with $1,500 in it. People were jumping on the Proxy Train… But all the seats were taken.

Decline:

I believe the decline started when everyone and their dog was buying a proxy putting it on shared hosting, and selling once their hosting account got suspended. Did you really think that your $5 a month hosting was going to let you host a site that would kill a VPS or even a dedicated server? So now we had a state where people were selling proxies for quick sales or for a cheap profit. While a regulare site goes for 10x-12x revenue. A proxy only sells for about 4x, and even that if your very lucky.

The next step was when everyone started offering proxy hosting… Did you really think you would be able to offer people unlimted bandwidth for $5 a month? I don’t blame some of these malicous hosts for trying, they had a very good niche. Finding a good proxy host is harder than looking for Atlantis but a reliable one can be found. These hosts put alot of proxies in limbo being up and down for a various times.

The nail in the coffin has to be the proxy.org scandal that rocked the proxy world. Some people claimed that Proxy.org was sending robotic traffic to click on peoples ads to get them more money so that the advertising money they spent seemed justified. What I really believe happened is someone malicous was using the sites listed at proxy.org to try to get webmasters banned. I believe this is what happened with me in December, and I still believe it is what is happening now. Who ever did it got what they wanted either way. The listings of proxies at proxy.org have declined from 9k to 5k in a matter of days. More information on this post about how many people were warned and how many banned because of it and this post about the waring google sent out.

Till Death or Low Profits Do You Part:

This Sunday I have officiailly pulled in about $1. This month I have done about $20 worth of advertising though, and only made a total of $450. The good ol’ days are now gone. That is from over 150 proxies. Okay I haven’t advertised all 150 yet, but still this is getting ridiculous. The month of May I believe will be my last with Proxies.

What to do next:

When I figure it out I’ll let you know. In the mean time update your WP themes by choosing a free one from Free Wordress Templates