“… you could try something that is almost guaranteed to make you money fast and quick: Proxies.”

mubin in his blog publishes a series of 5 posts that look at how to set up, run, and monetize a proxy service. He also provides some cautions on what not to do!

This is an interesting series, and a service with tremendous opportunities for helping those who are otherwise restricted by their countries’ censors.

I’m not exactly sure of the cost structure, though. I don’t quite understand the expenses involved as I would think that you’d need your own server to be able to run a service like this. So monthly upfront costs could be quite high.

Revenue sources would be primarily ads served by Yahoo!, Adsense, etc., though text links might also do very well. He suggests you try affiliate marketing, too.

It seems though from his own posting that one of the revenue streams comes from selling the site on to others. So do read the thread and make your own decision.

Actually, I think that I will check out my own TOS and see if I can install a copy of PHProxy in my own private areas: I can figure out how it runs and works, and I can use it to access websites that I can’t get to right now.

A word of caution: do check your hosts TOS. Some will NOT like such software. And you may get banned for using it!