I was recently asked by a friend of mine why I still bother with my nefarious black hat activities.

As he put it, I could spend the time I'm building throwaway sites to pump out some sites that get repeat visitors. 

Of course, he's always harping on this particular subject but I decided to go into a bit more depth this time and play with the numbers a little bit...

Let's assume you can buy a domain for $1.50.  Yes, you really can do that at the bulk registrars (and don't you dare use RegisterFly - they suck horribly) like DirectI.  Before I digress into a rant, what other costs would you have?

Well, you can get a cheap hosting account for $8 bucks a month or you can go for a dedicated server.  For the moment, let's say you got a cheap hosting account.

Your yearly costs at this point are going to mainly be your hosting ($96 per year).  Traffic is negligible and even the hosting costs are negligible...why?  Well, if you make $1 per year per site, you only need 96 sites to pay for your server...

So, for the purposes of my math here I'm going to ignore the cost of hosting.  Yes, it can factor in if you get dedicated servers but I'd like to keep this simple.

Anyhow, if you paid $1.50 for the domain and you'd like to double your money then you need to make $1.50 over the course of a year.  Assuming an average of 25 cents per click and a 10% click through rate (both of which are not hard to achieve) you'd only need 12 clicks or 120 impressions to double your money over the course of a year.

That's right.  You just got a 50% return on your money by putting up a 500 page site full of spammy content and throwing some ads on it.

Ignoring the HYIP (High Yield Investment Programs - high risk high return and often illegal) stuff that's floating around out there on the internet, there aren't many other places you can go to get that type of return on your money.

Throw in $300 and at the end of the year (quite often sooner) you'll have $600. 

Heck, back when I was doing this part time, I made a small change in my sites and overnight increased my income by 10%.  That one change gave me a $7,000 raise over what my day job was paying me at the time.

Now, the question is does it scale?  That is, can you put in $100,000 and pull in $200,000?  Well, therein lies the problem.  It seems that you can scale this up but there is a point where you'll run out of keywords and start competing with yourself. 

In my network last year, about $35,000 was spent.  That includes hosting and cost of domains.  When it was all said and done, over $120,000 was made --- and that was in about 8 out of 12 months of the year.

So I know that it can scale but I don't know where the upper limits are yet.

The interesting thing to note is that people like to argue that search engine spam is going to go away.  That's when I start laughing because I know the numbers behind this game and if you look at it with an objective eye you'll realize that even if the search engines filter out 90% of the spam there's still 10% that's slipping through.  So you'll just have to crank out a bit more to get it to scale :)

G-Man