Three deliberately boring directories in niches Google Maps handles badly, monetised with display ads: 80,000-100,000 monthly visitors and $2,300-$3,000 a month for three years, untouched for the last six months.
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Frey's route in matters because it explains the design of the business. He ran an e-commerce footwear brand for five years, burned out, spent about eighteen months flipping flea market and garage sale finds to pay rent, and then wrote himself a specification for what he wanted next: scalable, high margin, low startup cost, sellable as an asset, and doable from anywhere. That search led him to niche sites in 2022 — right before a core update flattened the category. What he noticed while learning SEO from YouTube was that the sites still holding steady in Ahrefs were directories. He built one without any grand plan, and within six months it was doing about a thousand visitors a day. He put ads on it, checked his earnings at the end of the month, and it was around $1,200, essentially pure profit. That was the turning point, three years ago. Today he has around eight directories, four taken properly end to end, three of which rank first on page one for their target keyword. Those three total roughly 80,000-100,000 monthly visitors and, in the month of the interview, are on pace for about $2,500. His three-year band is $2,300-$3,000 a month. He has not worked on any of them in about six months. He declines to share the URLs — the first time he did, competitors showed up in the niche. Everything else he discloses openly, including the mistakes.
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Create free accountEmail code only. No password.Data credibility: Two sources from the same operator. The revenue and traffic figures — $2,300-$3,000/month for about three years, roughly $2,500 in the interview month, three ranked directories at 80,000-100,000 monthly visitors, a first month of about $1,200 with ads, and a 50-page thrifting directory at 60,000-70,000 visitors — are all founder-reported on a podcast, unaudited, with no dashboards shown. He deliberately withholds the URLs because sharing them previously attracted competitors, so none of it can be independently checked. The competitor traffic figures in the companion video are a different grade: they are read live from Ahrefs on screen for named public domains (soakoregon.com, swimmingholes.org, concretedisciples.com, rockhounding.org, everyescaperoom.com, distillerytrail.com, kidsskatefree.com and others), which makes them third-party estimates of real sites rather than self-reports — though Ahrefs traffic is itself an estimate. The display-ad earnings expectations of $80-$100/month at 2,200-2,600 visitors, and a few hundred at 13,000-15,000, are his own rules of thumb. He also discloses that scraping Google Maps breaches its terms and that he sells access to a paid directory-building community, which is the commercial interest behind both videos.