Thread by @paulk139

This ugly blog about K-POP gets close to 50 million pageviews / month and makes between $3-6 million a year.

- Zero fulltime employees
- No ad spend
- No social presence
- Publishes just once or twice a day

Here's a breakdown🧵

1/ Kprofiles.com is a website that lists profile informatio and interesting facts about Korean celebrities and K-POP groups.

They launched in 2016, just in time to catch the explosive growth in popularity of KPOP in the US, and around the world.

2/ BTS became an uncontested US phenomenon in 2017, with two songs hitting the Billboard Hot 100, a huge performance at the American Music Awards, a New Year’s Eve performance in Times Square, and a remix of their latest single, “Mic Drop,” done by Steve Aoki.

3/ Google searches for information around K-POP groups exploded.

4/ And every major blog and media outlet in the US was writing about the K-POP phenomenon.

5/ And everytime they did, they would link to Kprofiles.

Why?

Because Kprofiles' content style is basically a giant link magnet. They create wiki style pages for every KPOP group and Korean celebrity that contain basic profile information and interesting facts.

6/ Everytime a journalist looked up a Korean celebrity's full name, age, favorite color, interesting facts, etc...

They would land on Kprofiles and then credit them as the source.

7/ As a result, almost every single major news website in the US has linked to them.

We're talking sites like Time, Inc, Forbes, People Magazine, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Washington Post, and the list goes on.

8/ They have 1.2 million backlinks to their website from 22,000 different websites.

They also have 5,703 links from Wikipedia. If a Korean celebrity has a Wikipedia page, it usually contains a link to Kprofiles as a source.

9/ And that's their moat.

This crazy volume of extremely powerful links ranks them #1 on Google for almost every K-POP profile related keyword and makes them almost impossible to compete with.

10/ And because K-POP popularity has exploded worldwide, these keywords have massive search volumes.

Even though their content isn't anything special, they're driving over 10 million visitors per month through search engine traffic alone.

11/ Some of these keywords have over a million searches per month globabally.

For example, this is the monthly search volume for the keyword "BTS members" which Kprofiles ranks #1 for.

12/ HOW MUCH TOTAL TRAFFIC?

My estimation on the low end is around 15-20 million visitors per month.

If you want a full breakdown, I wrote a more in-depth report about it here: paulkim.beehiiv.com/p/ugly-website…

13/ HOW MUCH MONEY DO THEY MAKE?

The only way they monetize is through ads.

If we run the math, they're making anywhere between $240K and $480K per MONTH.

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

Full breakdown on that is also in the report.

14/ That's insane. And the coolest thing about it is that this website isn't just a one-off viral hit that's at risk of losing all their traffic.

As long as K-POP remains popular, they're going to continue getting millions of visitors per month. All free traffic from Google.

15/ There are two other giant media powerhouses in the KPOP/Korean entertainment news space.

Allkpop.com and soompi.com. But they're completely different models. They cover news/gossip much like US celebrity blogs like People Magazine or BuzzFeed or TMZ

16/ They employ dozens of people, pump out tons of articles per day, and have high overhead. And since they're in the current events business, they're also in the mass publishing game.

If they don't publish daily, they lose relevance.

17/ Kprofiles on the other hand, publishes just once or twice a day. Some days, they don't publish anything. They're content is evergreen. They don't need to chase viral news stories to maintain their pageview levels.

18/ And still, Kprofiles is getting more search traffic than both of these sites combined.

Search traffic for Allkpop and Soompi:

19/ A few other people have noticed the quiet success of Kprofiles and have already attempted to copy them.

Some have better content, site structure, and formatting than Kprofiles.

But they just compete with Kprofile's massive backlink profile.

If you enjoyed this, follow @paulk139 for more. I constantly come across interesting little websites on the web quietly making 6-7 figures in weird little niches.

Will be writing about them here: paulkim.beehiiv.com/subscribe

And if you want to read the more in-depth report I wrote on Kprofiles, check it out. You'll get a deeper insight on their traffic and revenue.

paulkim.beehiiv.com/p/ugly-website…