Are Me An My Friends The Only Ones Who Believe Mugglenet Is Making A Ton Of Money?

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

ok... on mugglenet.com 's website, it states

it's here to be a resource for Harry Potter fans.

well it may not say free resource... but i think that they lie when they say that it costs over 120,000 a year to run mugglenet

Well, me and my friends were talking, and we were talking about the note on the bottom of Mugglenet.com saying "Mugglenet costs over $120,000 a year to run, and were like yeah right! so i did some digging and here is what i got......

there is this one site where you pay for what you want.. and its called Madhost http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

So lets say this is the cenario

Say they have 50 employee's that neeed FTP access at 1 buck for 10 accounts thats 5 dollars... and they dont even have 50 employees that need FTP access..... maybe the 6 that are listed on their staff page

say they have 10 sub-domains, at 1 buck for 5..thats 2 bucks

lets see...they have galleries, forums, poll, webmail for people, fan fiction, and newsletter. thats 5 MySql Databases, and at 1 buck for 5 MySql Databses, thats another buck.... but the size limit might make a differense so tack on an extra 5 or 10 bucks

say they need 25,000 MB of space that $1000, if they need 50,000 thats $2000 but they dont have all that many pages, so lets go with 25,000

say they need 50,000 MB of bandwidth, thats another 1000... if they need 100,000 thats $2,000 but lets go with 50k
lets add it up...
1
2
7
1000
1000
------
$2010..

lol im busting up laughing now, and $120,000 a year divided by 12 months is 12,000 a month....compared to $2010 a month LMAO

now lets try that with the $2000 worth of bandwidth, and $2000 worth of space

1
2
7
2000
2000
------
4010...

well, double to bandwidth, and double the space and were still $8,000 less than what they claim to be paying

not to mention the money they get for the t-shirts, and other Muggglenet/Harry potter supplies they sell... and the paid e-mail they offer...

lol, but the whole point is...Emerson *the maker* can retire by the time he's 30 and running the site lmao.. because they say it costs 120,000 a year, but it really doesn't and he takes the extra money he gets and pockets it

[Johnny 1]

I would think no website short of Google would cost over $100,000 a year to run. Maybe Mugglenet runs on Yen. The current exchange rate is 115 Y per 1 USD.

 

[side note: Did you know India uses Rupees as a currency? I learned that when I was a kid playing Zelda. ]

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

lol someone does agree with meno i never knew that, just like i never knew that yen's were the japanese form of currency.... lol

[Galahad 0]

I agree with you, they do put tons of money in their pockets... I never heard of this site, but from the calculations... I guess they do rip people off...Maybe you could make some sort of a deal with them, and introduce them to Xisto - Web Hosting, and claim the difference for your self, work for a percentage :)but 120.000 for running a site... That's even beyond Google's expenses... Maybe one of the Admins here could tell us how much Xisto costs to run per year, just for comparison...

[SolarX 0]

Thaks for your interesting post, but I think they earn even more than 120.000 a year, because they must have tons of visitors and therefore much clicks on their ads.

[Avalon 1]

I think perhaps there is something you are overlooking here. I don't know the site but one might expect there are researchers to collect the content, web designers to keep the page up to date, advertising costs and the cost of making the marketing items such as the t-shirts. If you are looking at these types of things, then it is not hard to see that $120,000 might not be such an unrealistic figure. I mean, does it say anywhere that it costs them $120,000 for just the hosting costs? I think perhaps you need to look at the big picture to understand what might be the total cost of running such a site. Just a thought.

[Albus Dumbledore 0]

I think perhaps there is something you are overlooking here. I don't know the site but one might expect there are researchers to collect the content, web designers to keep the page up to date, advertising costs and the cost of making the marketing items such as the t-shirts. If you are looking at these types of things, then it is not hard to see that $120,000 might not be such an unrealistic figure. I mean, does it say anywhere that it costs them $120,000 for just the hosting costs? I think perhaps you need to look at the big picture to understand what might be the total cost of running such a site. Just a thought.

i did look at that, and it still doesn't add up, no they dont pay any of the people that work there, to most people, it would be an HONNOR to work as a graphics designer on mugglenet... or anything on mugglenet...

as for the t-shirts, they come cheap... if they did the searching, and then bought the shirts in bulk... (like 200 small, 200 large, 200 meduim, and 200 x- large.... they all cost the same.. and me being on my schools student counsil for two years nad having to place the order for over 3000 t-shirts, it only costs us apx 2500 bucks for t-shirts.... so cant say much for that... and yes, the least amount of people ive see on the site at once is around 900 members, there are generally around 2k on at a time....

[hedzup 0]

Well you only calcuated the price of ONE host. There are tons out there, all different. Although a webhost might offer cheap bandwith/space, they might run slow. So you would have to move on to another webhost which is much more expensive, but is much faster. Orrr, perhaps they host the site on their own computers/servers, that might cost a bunch of money, for equipment/service... Maybe the stories or interviews they do cost money, talk ain't cheap . Maybe they have to pay money for using harry potter images that might be copyrighted. Maybe they have to pay someone to do scripting/graphics work for them... there are so many costs to consider, it would easily add up, I would think... But yeah, I'm sure they're getting some kind of revenue, why not?!

[sandeep95 0]

maybe its in another currency. Try researching a little more.

[sheepdog 10]

I suspect Avalon is correct, there are a lot of expenses to operating a successful web site. Advertising costs to get traffic to the site can be tremendous. And as far as click backs from the advertisers they have, those are only pennies coming in for click threws. I doubt if all that many graphic designers would work for free, or consider it an honer to work and not get paid for it.And besides, what does it matter if they are making money???? Isn't that the goal in working? Or the great American dream? If some one comes up with a great invention/idea/web site and they work hard on it and make something of it, why shouldn't they profit from their efforts?

[The Simpleton 2]

$120,000 is a ridiculously large amount to run a site. And even if they are paying that kind of money to run the site, I can say that the money used isn't being put to good use. The site is so cluttered that a newcomer has a tough time going around. Everything is squeezed into small parts and it's a really a strain on the eyes to find something in particular there.

 

I don't think the outside world should be bothered much about how much the site makes. They're not looting anyone, are they? But I wouldn't click on an ad or do anything else there which will give them profit, because I feel that site isn't worth the effort. If only they were to make the design more sensible, more visitors would get stuck to them and they would be able to meet that 120,000 cost!

[rpgsearcherz 5]

$120,000 isn't a lot for a site when you really consider it. You guys are bringing up the costs based on the size of the site and how much monthly bandwidth is used. A major site would be using a dedicated server.This then includes maintenance costs, connection speed costs (for example 100 MB/s costs $800+ a month in most places and if it has a lot of media and users you would need at least 1 GB/s if not more), and more.Consider license costs for material used that may be copyright protected.And there's more.Don't assume every website is like the one you could toss up in 5 minutes. As the site grows in user base the cost starts to grow exponentially as well.Take Youtube, for example. It started out as a small website until it was sold to Google. Once they took it in and the user base grew, as did the cost. Youtube, as of mid 2008, was costing $1.5 million a month to host (in bandwidth charges alone).

[The Simpleton 2]

hmm $1.5 million you say? that's a pretty impressive figure and yes it's not easy to reach that level. and once a certain reputation has been earned its not easy to maintain it! bandwidth is the most important factor for website costs but I think in the coming days costs will reduce considerably, seeing that the internet population is growing day by day and many people are starting their own websites.so naturally maintainance costs will come down. that's just my thought

[rpgsearcherz 5]

hmm $1.5 million you say? that's a pretty impressive figure and yes it's not easy to reach that level. and once a certain reputation has been earned its not easy to maintain it! bandwidth is the most important factor for website costs but I think in the coming days costs will reduce considerably, seeing that the internet population is growing day by day and many people are starting their own websites.so naturally maintainance costs will come down. that's just my thought

I disagree with that... With what I've seen so far the prices haven't gone down in years and so I doubt they will end up going down. Any website that has enough people to warrant higher costs due to bandwidth is clearly making enough money to pay for the costs anyways.

And yes, that $1.5 mil a month was long ago. It has gone up considerably since then. Think about it : Hundreds of thousands of people downloading from their site 24/7... Even some game companies are now charging to download their client due to the bandwidth costs (Think Age of Conan... $3 for an account to download their BETA client, rofl)

[The Simpleton 2]

I disagree with that... With what I've seen so far the prices haven't gone down in years and so I doubt they will end up going down. Any website that has enough people to warrant higher costs due to bandwidth is clearly making enough money to pay for the costs anyways.

I may be wrong here, but wasn't there a time when one had to shell out $100 for registering a domain? What do we have now? A mere $10 per year! Domains may be an entirely different field altogether, but the overall concept is similar. When something becomes more and more popular, the price will decrease sometime or the other. Take Xisto for example. The lowest hosting package is $1.95 per month, while the average price out there is around $5 per month. Now isn't there a good chance that others will succumb to the competition and reduce their prices too?

 

Think Age of Conan... $3 for an account to download their BETA client, rofl

Asking visitors to pay for the bandwidth to use is really a cheap trick! It just shows how greedy people can be - trying to make money off everything.