His Site Makes $1,000 Monthly on Autopilot
How this web developer acquired a site and makes money via ads on auto-pilot
Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
Hey there, I am Tony and I'm a 42 years old old school web developer (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL) from Romania.
I’m currently running Jimpl, a website with an online EXIF data viewer that uncovers hidden metadata from your photos.
Whenever I have a problem, I research what solutions are out there and if I find a good one, I try to buy it.
If I can't afford it or the owner doesn't want to sell it, I build my own version.
Most of the time, only 1 out of 20 sites I build catches-on, because I'm not that good at promoting them.
This is why lately I leaned more on buying sites
How did you start this business? Take us through the process.
Jimpl.com was actually an acquisition, a lucky one I would say!
Back in 2020, I wanted to check the metadata of an old photo (hidden information in photos, like location, camera, etc) and that's how I've discovered Jimpl.
The site was launched in 2010 and grew organically. I loved how simple and straight to the point it was, so I've contacted the owner and asked if he's interested in selling it.
It turns out that he was from Ukraine and he wanted to escape the war and start a new life in Gdansk, Poland.
We decided to meet in Budapest and do the deal.
How are you marketing the business right now?
When I bought it, the traffic was organic and it kept steady since then.
I know I should spend more time promoting and improving the service, but I've been busy with my other projects, so I've kind of neglected Jimpl (Please get in touch if you have ideas on how I could grow the site)
The only thing I've added to the site since I've bought it, was the option to remove EXIF metadata from a photo:
This allows for photos to be "fingers print" free, so no one can track the author.
As for improvement plans, several users asked for an ad-free version and I'm thinking about adding a paid version, which has no ads and offers extra features.
I'll just have to get on and build this.
I haven't done any kind of marketing for it, as I said, I'm not really good at that. The main source of traffic is just Google and return visitors, which I shows that users really love the service.
How does the business make money?
The site is monetized with Google Ads only.
I'm thinking about adding a paid plan for heavy usage, but haven't got to it yet, so currently the site is 100% free!
The site made about 1000EUR every month. My only cost is hosting, which costs about 60EUR/m and it's a dedicated server from Hetzner where I host other sites that I own also.
Since this is a tool site, it's currently on auto-pilot and I spend zero time on it.
Where can we go to learn more?
I'm not very active on social media, but those interested in my projects can follow me on Twitter.
You can also get in touch using this simple contact form.
Thank you for reading!