I would guess so. It might be harder to take payments now than it was then, though, which would add friction and lower your revenues. I bet hosting is cheaper now, though.
Back then we took credit cards with PayPal and PayPal were on our side. We had our own personal account manager because we were moving so much money. PayPal had a login for the site and they would go in every few weeks and make sure we weren't doing anything too shady. What would happen is that every couple of months our competitors would claim we were actually selling child porn, and PayPal would be forced to immediately close our account while they investigated. I guess this is a good technique to close down any small business reliant on a merchant account.
We never intended to make money at first. We just wanted to cover the hosting bills and asked for donations. It's just that by offering upload credit as an incentive to donate, we created a market. And the donations far outweighed the costs over the long run. The total was probably more than $13m because I only queried the SQL data and I'm not sure we logged the donations at first.
Also, we were a very niche TV tracker, so we wouldn't have anywhere near the user base some of those other sites have.
Back then we took credit cards with PayPal and PayPal were on our side. We had our own personal account manager because we were moving so much money. PayPal had a login for the site and they would go in every few weeks and make sure we weren't doing anything too shady. What would happen is that every couple of months our competitors would claim we were actually selling child porn, and PayPal would be forced to immediately close our account while they investigated. I guess this is a good technique to close down any small business reliant on a merchant account.
We never intended to make money at first. We just wanted to cover the hosting bills and asked for donations. It's just that by offering upload credit as an incentive to donate, we created a market. And the donations far outweighed the costs over the long run. The total was probably more than $13m because I only queried the SQL data and I'm not sure we logged the donations at first.
Also, we were a very niche TV tracker, so we wouldn't have anywhere near the user base some of those other sites have.