Monetizing filehost

[Tim Schoon]

I'm about to develop my domain upload dot info into a file hosting site, but I'm a bit puzzled about ways of monetizing it..

Many large file hosts don't have any ads - they actually even pay users for downloads..

How does this work? How does a site like mediafire or uploading.com make cash from paying for downloads?

I see they offer premium accounts but I can't imagine they would sell enough of those to compensate for the massive download payout.

 

[rootzone]

Mediafire has ads and is #100 on Google Doubleclick Top 1000 Sites. According to big G, Mediafire gets 31,000,000 monthly unique visitors with around 370,000,000 page views. Assume a hypothetical 3% click through rate (clicks/pageviews) and they might be seeing 11,100,000 monthly clicks. Use an average CPC of $.30 and Mediafire is making about $3,330,000 hypothetical dollars a month.

As a bit of disclaimer, there is no way to estimate the quality score based CPC or CTR that another company gets... my example was for illustrative purposes only. The CPC and CTR numbers that I’ve used are numbers I’ve seen mentioned around the web as 'averages'.