Originally Posted by wankawonk

well you can check out smartCJ, but I honestly don't see any sites using smartCJ ranking in google. it's all people trading traffic and I don't think there's much actual profit in that. Other than smartCJ you can use mechbunny (but again I don't see those ranking) or tube-ace (and again, I haven't seen any tube-ace sites ranking).

I really think you have to make your own script to rank with an embedded tube. if you're using someone elses script you have duplicate content with duplicate script. google won't like that.

tubesafari is one small-ish front end server (t2.large on AWS) and a couple of bigger backend servers (m4.xlarge I think) for elasticsearch and redis. But I have to spend more on server costs than most CJ tubes because the way I calculate related videos is computationally very expensive (but it works great and make my sites retain users really really well). If you were doing a site like alohatube (that doesn't have related videos) you could get away with 1 server. I also spin up an extra server once per night to do some data analysis (to make user clicks influence my search results)

I get a ton of DMCA takedown notices. Multiple every single day. I want to scream at these people, "IM NOT HOSTING THE CONTENT, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME, GO AFTER PORNHUB!!!" But there's nothing you can do, just gotta remove the content.

I might recommend you use mechbunny for your backend/CMS, and code up your own theme and templates. That way your site will look new to google. I see so many sites running the default mechbunny theme and none of them rank. But with mechbunny your search results will suck, so you might also have to modify it to use elasticsearch, which would be hard.

it's not an easy niche to get into, that's for sure