This website makes 20 million visits a month with bio and net worth of stars

Posted by Jennifer on January 8th, 2021

So celebnetworth.net has built a database of stars and starlets

When is my favorite actor's birthday? How old is the creator of this cool YouTube channel? Such questions do not appear to be seldom asked by fans. Because celebnetworth.net, a database for dates of birth of sometimes more, sometimes less prominent people, generates an average of over 20 million visits per month. OMR introduces the project, explains mechanics with the help of which the engagement of the users should be increased and how the site earns money.

What do three-year-old Levi Morales, singer Ne-Yo and actor Zac Efron have in common? All three have their birthday on October 18th and will be featured on the home page of celebnetworth.net under the heading "Today's Birthdays". While Efron and Ne-Yo are unlikely to have any discussion that they really deserve the status of "prominent", it looks a little different with Levi Morales . He is the son of Oscar Morales and Kyra Sivertson, the operators of the Youtube channel " Okbaby " (1.3 million subscribers, 360 million views).

This mixture illustrates the content strategy and the target group that celebnetworth.net wants to reach. In addition to "classic" celebrities, the portal primarily relies on data from influencers and young Internet stars who have become known on platforms such as Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok (previously Musically). And the calculation also seems to work from a reach perspective: According to data from the statistics service Similarweb, the site has received an average of almost 23 million visits per month over the past two years. In September 2017, there were 19.37 million visits.

"Wikipedia for Generation Z"

The project celebnetworth.net, based in Santa Monica, California, was founded by Aneeq at the beginning of 2012. After acquiring a number of domains with ResourceWebs, a company he also founded, and wanting to build and use them in parallel, he decided at the end of 2011 to focus on one portal. "We realized afer 2011 that we were spreading ourselves thin by trying to make five to ten websites great," Aneeq told socaltech.com in mid-2013 . "So, at the beginning of 2012, we picked a website that we owned, to make it awesome." The choice fell on Celebnetworth.net. Before that, he and his colleagues had sold a real estate website to a private equity firm.

The "Wikipedia for Generation Z", as founder Evan Britton calls the site himself, is said to include over 150,000 detailed pages on celebrities and internet stars. In addition to the dates of birth, there is also a picture gallery, a short biography, net worth, physical stats and numerous suggestions for other profiles that might interest the user. According to Aneeq's Linkedin profile, Celebnetworth has over 30 employees.

Celebnetworth.net as a trend radar

According to Aneeq, there is a simple reason why the portal began to take care of Internet stars at a relatively early stage instead of just relying on traditional celebrities. With the help of the search bar, users of the site were increasingly searching for names that the creators themselves did not even know. "Who was perceived to be famous didn't match up with who had the actual fans," Aneeq. Any such request that Celebnetworth.net cannot handle has since become a to-do for the team. "Unmatched searches are our roadmap in terms of who or what we need to put on our platform," says founder Aneeq.

From 500,000 search queries a day for social media stars, some of which are not yet listed, and additional messages from fans with information that must be added to existing profiles, this results in around 1,000 updates for the team to check - per day.

Simple mechanics as engagement and traffic drivers

As early as 2013, a little more than a year after the start of Celebnetworth, founder Aneeq explained in an interview with socaltech.com which levers are being used to drive the site's organic growth. Every celebrity profile has a “Boost” button. Every click, as well as every search query on the page, flows into a virtually continuous voting. The results are rankings in a wide variety of categories.

The largest ranking, " Most Popular ", lists which profiles have received the most likes - regardless of age, occupation or zodiac sign. This ranking is led by 16-year-old Jacob Sartorius , who originally became known for uploading videos to Musically. Today the teenager has over nine million subscribers on Instagram and has already published a music album. Pop star Justin Bieber follows in second place.

Another ranking list that is apparently popular because it is also linked in the header of the website is called “Trending” and includes profiles that have recently received “Boosts” extremely frequently. In addition, further rankings are linked to each profile, such as "Born in ...", "First Name ..." or "Born on ...".

Social media channels and monetization

Although celebnetworth.net is represented on the major platforms and the reach is impressive - 500,000 subscribers on Instagram , almost 470,000 fans on Facebook , 120,000 subscriptions on Youtube and 464,000 followers on Twitter - SEO seems to be by far the most important channel.

According to Similarweb, over 77 percent of the total traffic is generated via "Organic Search", followed by "Direct" with around 20 percent. According to these data, “social” plays almost no role at a meager 1.16 percent. At least for traditional celebrities, however, the organic traffic achieved via Google is likely to have already declined: For many “birthday name xy” -style search queries, Google displays the answer in a featured snippet above the first organic search result. It should therefore make sense to continue to rely more on young Internet stars who, for example, do not yet have Wikipedia articles. Otherwise Celebnetworth.net could fare similarly to the celebritynetworth.com portal. When Google started showing celebrity wealth information in featured snippets, the traffic of the portal collapsed.

By the way, Celebnetworth.net earns money almost exclusively with display ads from the Google network. Founder Aneeq said in 2013 : “We never have to worry about monetization, and outsource that to Google. Instead, we build a very good product, get organic traffic, and those networks pay well. ”Even then, the next step was to establish direct partnerships with advertisers from the entertainment sector. It remains unclear whether this has worked so far; the video section on the website contains at least a few interviews with actors from Disney productions.