3.1 million visitors/mo from a simple tool

...and it survived every Google update!

Author

Ian H
May 18, 2024

I was browsing through Site Stats Database for some niche inspiration today, and stumbled across a very interesting site.

The domain was registered in 2021, but traffic didn’t start picking up until last year. It now gets 1.3 million monthly visitors (according to Ahrefs) and survived all Google’s updates.

SimilarWeb estimates even higher traffic. 3.1 million! Which makes sense, as Ahrefs only measures organic traffic from Google. SimilarWeb measures all traffic from all sources.

The site is imagetotext.io.

It simply offers an image to text tool. You upload an image, and it extracts the text from the image. Super useful!

What caught my eye is that it’s free to use, but has a premium plan as well for $4.99/mo (there’s also a weekly and yearly plan).

I don’t know how well it converts.

But even if just 0.1% of users purchase premium (that’s 1 out of a thousand), at 3 million monthly visitors, that’s $15,000/month. And a lot more if people stay on premium for more than one month.

And that’s not all.

The site is plastered with ads.

Even with a paltry RPM of $1, that’s $3,000/mo. Not too shabby. And it’s very possible the RPM is more like $5, which would be $15,000/mo from ads!

You’re looking at a potential $30K/mo. Which would value the site at around $1 million.

Browsing Site Stats Database, I found another image to text site, imagetotext.info.

It’s even larger. 5 million monthly visitors according to SimilarWeb.

And it has the same basic design and premium plans. I’d guess it’s owned by the same people behind imagetotext (.io).

How hard would it be to build a similar site?

I asked ChatGPT (GPT-4o), and it provided all the steps and code necessary to build my own image to text site in WordPress.

I went from nothing to this in about 10 minutes:

It needed some more work, as the actual image-to-text code wasn’t installed properly.

I went back and forth with ChatGPT, sharing screenshots of any problems I ran into and asking for guidance on what to do.

In my case, the problem came down to my host not granting proper permissions - but I only found out after troubleshooting with ChatGPT and trying a bunch of other things.

The point here is that tools like this aren’t that difficult to build. It’d maybe take a day or two.

You can build tools as standalone sites like the ones I shared earlier, or as additions to your current site. Tools can attract tons of backlinks (and traffic).

If you want to find a bunch of tool site ideas, check out Site Stats Database. In the niche filter, enter “converter”, “calculator”, and “generator”. These filters show over 2,000 sites, many of which are very unique ideas most people probably haven’t thought of.

It’s a lot of fun to look through. I find fascinating new niche ideas every time I use Site Stats Database.

Building tool sites can be a great alternative to traditional content sites, as Google didn’t hit tool sites nearly as much during the recent updates. Plus, they’re a lot more fun, I think! And they’re easier to maintain as you don’t have to contantly add new content.

Hope this was inspiring in some way.

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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