This ugly website about K-POP makes nearly $6 million per year

There's a website out there that barely publishes any content, looks like an ugly Blogspot blog, has zero full-time employees, and is making 7-figures per year with just display ads.

And I'm betting that 99% of people reading this have never even heard of the site.

Let's dive in...

I'm Korean, as you may have guessed by my name.

I don't follow Korean celebrities or anything. But I stumbled upon the Korean celebs niche a few years ago, just as Korean dramas were getting popular in the US, and decided to dig into it.

It was fascinating to me that American companies were building big media companies based around news about Korean entertainment.

What I learned was that there are two big powerhouse media brands in the space: Allkpop.com and soompi.com - basically the People Magazines of the Korean entertainment industry catered for the English speaking audience.

They got millions of visitors per month, and their audiences were super engaged like anything I've ever seen. People who loved Kpop were obviously absolutely obsessed about it, and as a result, these sites became their homes on the internet.

These sites were big media news sites, run similarly to BuzzFeed. They have almost a hundred employees and have high overhead. And because they're in the news business, they pump out a ton of articles every single day.

Then, I discovered another site in the niche: kprofiles.com

At first glance, it looks outdated, almost like it was built on Geocities or Blogspot. I didn't think much of it, until I checked their traffic and link profile.

After a bit of digging, I learned...

This little website was actually getting more traffic than Allkpop and Soompi combined... and it was making millions of dollars per year.

🤯

And unlike Allkpop and Soompi, Kprofiles seems to be a very tiny operation. They have no full-time staff, and they publish maybe once or twice a day.

Their content is evergreen. They're not a news site, so they don't need to continuously pump out content about the latest gossip and happenings in the space.

Instead, they rank for things like celebrity names, age, member information of kpop groups.

And because of how popular Korean entertainment has gotten globally, Google searches around these types of keywords are in the hundreds of thousands of searches per month.

Some of them get over a million.

For example, Kprofiles ranks #1 when someone searches for BTS members on Google. That single query is searched 1.2 million times per month globally.

Let's take another popular Kpop group, Twice. They also rank #1 for the keyword, Twice Members, which gets 320,000 searches per month.

These 2 keywords alone add up to more than 1.5 million searches per month.

But they rank #1 for this search query for every single Kpop group out there. You can imagine just how much traffic they must be pulling in with all the different Korean Kpop groups and celebrities out there.

And they've even now expanded their content to celebrities in other countries like China, Japan, and Thailand.

How much traffic do they get?

Semrush shows they're getting around 13.7 million visitors per month. All through search. They do no paid advertising, and barely have a social presence.

SimilarWeb shows around 10 million visitors per month.

Accounting for direct, social, and referral traffic, it's probably in the 15-20 million visitors per month range (on the low end).

SimilarWeb also shows that they get around ~2 pages per visitor, which means they get around 30-40 million pageviews per month.

Sounds fairly accurate.

Let's take that number and calculate just how much they're making.

How much are they making?

The only way they're monetizing the site is through ads.

Looking at their source code, it seems they're using an ad network I've never heard of called Increase Rev.

I couldn't tell if they're a premium network with super high CPMs or a lower-tier network for sites that couldn't get accepted into good networks.

My guess is that they're a lower tier network. Based on several things:

1. The website for the ad network looks horrible. No credibility, no large websites using them.

A bad looking website doesn't necessarily mean it's not a reputable brand.

But come on, this is next level bad.

2. The majority of traffic on Kprofiles is not in the US. Premium US ad networks that pay the highest usually require at least 40% of your traffic to be US, UK, or Canadian traffic.

In this case, it's scattered all over the world because of the worldwide interest in Korean celebrities.

With premium US ad networks, they'd probably get anywhere between $15-$30 CPMs.

With a standard Adsense account, maybe anywhere between $1-6 CPMs.

Considering this seems to be a lower tier ad network, but still claims to be better than Adsense, I assume they're probably getting anywhere between $8-$12 CPMs.

If they're not getting at least that, why would they even use this network...? They'd just use Adsense.

Let's run some calculations based on the traffic numbers and CPMs to estimate how much they're making.

Remember we estimated monthly pageviews to be around the 30-40 million range.

We estimated CPMs to be in the $8-$12 range.

30 million pageviews X $8 = $240,000 per month.

30 million pageviews X $12 = $360,000 per month.

40 million pageviews X $8 = $320,000 per month.

40 million pageviews X $12 = $480,000 per month.

(for context, CPM is multiplied per 1000 visitors so 30 million visitors would be 30,000 x $8).

So they're making anywhere between $240K and $480K per MONTH.

Per year, they're making anywhere between $2.8 million and $5.7 million.

All through ads.

There are a lot of high traffic sites on the internet that make a lot of money with ads. What makes this site so interesting?

Basically, because this site is going to be making millions forever, even with no full-time employees or any further innovation required.

That's extremely rare. Even sites like NerdWallet, considered the leaders in the finance SEO space, are constantly fending off new competitors who come out with more innovative product offerings (eg. Credit Karma).

Any business that relies so heavily on Google is considered high-risk. Both in terms of losing traffic from Google or in terms of competitors stealing their keywords. But it's not really the case with Kprofiles.

They've been crowned as the official top resource for their domain.

Google ranks them #1 (above Wikipedia) for almost every single keyword involving kpop group members, or when searching for basic profile information.

And as a result, they have a TON of huge backlinks. They have 1.2 million backlinks from 22,000 different websites. They also have 5,703 links from Wikipedia - pretty much if a Korean celebrity has a Wikipedia page, it also has a link to Kprofiles as a source.

That kind of volume of links from Wikipedia pretty much cements this website as an authority figure in the space.

Not only that... but basically every single major news website in the US has linked to them as well. We're talking sites like Time Magazine, Inc, Forbes, People Magazine, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Washington Post, and the list goes on.

When Kpop groups like BTS started to take off worldwide and gained popularity in the US, huge news sites started to cover them.

And almost every one of them would link to Kprofiles as a source.

Similarities to song lyrics

The search queries on this site reminds me of song lyrics.

Song lyrics also have huge search volumes in the hundreds of thousands or sometimes even millions for popular songs.

Rap Genius saw that every site was basically doing the same thing. They would just copy and paste the lyrics on their websites. The site with the most authority (basically, most backlinks) would rank highest on Google and got millions of visitors per month.

So, Rap Genius found a unique angle: Lyrics explained line-by-line directly by the artists.

This was enough to give it a unique edge that people preferred, and they eventually became the market leaders in song lyric searches. Today, similar to Kprofiles, they're ranking #1 for all lyrics searches, and getting over 100 million visitors per month from search alone. With the brand they've built, they're probably getting over 500 million pageviews a month.

I'm guessing most people reading this had no idea that searches around basic profile info for Korean celebrities had such a massive amount of search interest per month.

If anybody wanted to compete with them, they'd have to create something with a unique angle like Rap Genius did.

But given that the "BOOM" in kpop has kind of passed by already, and it's just kind of become mainstream now, it'll be tough to catch another explosive wave of media coverage around kpop like the first time around.

I find a ton of interesting websites quietly making 6-7 figures per year. Subscribe to my newsletter for more profiles like this one.

Cheers,Paul Kim

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