# A 11-year-old Windows tutorial blog, bought and then flooded with 200k pages within three months: iTechGuides and the 35-site network behind it · Web

> Source: https://stringers.io/en/web/web_itechguides.com.html (Stringers / 什么值得做, generated 2026-11-08)
> Stringers answers one question every day: what small product can one or two people build in a few months and actually make money from. Numbers come from 15 databases we collect daily, each with source and date.
> For agents: these verdicts and the underlying databases (verified revenue, App Store / Google Play charts, ad libraries, GitHub, Product Hunt…) are queryable live over MCP — tools today / hot / products / directions / direction / data. Setup: https://github.com/komako-workshop/stringers (the user logs in at stringers.io → "配置 agent" to get a personal URL). Site index: https://stringers.io/llms.txt

> The bought 11-year-old domain came with existing search authority. The new owner used a program to launch 4,648 lists, 86k tool pages, and 128k comparison pages all at once, capturing a lot of long-tail search and AI citations. Sites on the same network with 15+ entries rose at the same time.

[Web](https://stringers.io/en/web/index.md) · 11-6 written

iTechGuides · itechguides.com

# A 11-year-old Windows tutorial blog, bought and then flooded with 200k pages within three months: iTechGuides and the 35-site network

**What it is** An acquired old tech blog, turned into an auto-generated software ranking and comparison site that earns from ads, affiliate commissions, and selling ranking spots.

**Why it took off** The purchased 11-year-old domain came with search authority, and the new owner used scripts to publish 4,648 rankings, 86k tool pages, and 128k comparison pages at once, capturing large amounts of long-tail search and AI citations. More than 15 sites in the same network grew at the same time.

**C** **How you could follow** If you want to follow, don't build a full-category directory. Pick a narrow vertical, use an old domain in that niche with structured templates to publish pages, then copy its approach of listing vendor prices and self-serve sales of inclusion and ranking spots. Budget as if Google could wipe it out within a year.

Grade C: the playbook is real and copyable, but it relies on buying old domains and betting Google won't penalize, right on three lines of Google's spam policies. Full-category software directories are already crowded, and rivals hold 35 old domains, so an ordinary indie dev chasing it won't profit. What's worth learning is the pricing of paid placement and self-serve checkout. Few people know about it yet

Global rank 95k · 90 days ago 671k

A Microsoft IT engineer wrote a Windows tutorial site for ten years, and in the summer of 2026 it changed hands. The new owner, a small publishing company in Bihar, India, converted it into a "software rankings" site: 4,648 rankings, 86k tool pages, and 128k "A vs B" comparison pages, with first drafts generated by program and ranking spots sold at published prices. Its global rank climbed from 670k to 95k over 90 days. This piece explains how it changed, where its traffic and money come from, why the playbook doesn't only work on one site, and whether you should follow.

### Three things on one page

On Nov 7, open itechguides.com's "The Best Shared Web Hosting in 2026". Ranked first is DreamHost, scored 9.2, "#1 of 705". The "Visit DreamHost" button is an affiliate link with `aff_id`. Beside the button, small text reads: "For vendors · Sponsor this spot · #1 · $149/mo". At the top of the page sits the page's own traffic stats: 60 visits in the past 30 days, 5 clicks through to vendors, and an average stay of 13 seconds.

One page, three ways to make money: affiliate commissions, selling ranking spots, plus the code for more than a hundred Raptive display ad slots on the page. Yet this page had only 60 visits. The site's money doesn't come from any one page going viral. It comes from dozens of visits on each of 200k pages.

Half a year ago it looked completely different. In the Internet Archive snapshot from May 2026 13, the title read "How-to guides, technology explained, reviews," and the sidebar listed founder Victor Ashiedu's personal site VictorAshiedu.com and sister site itechFAQs.com. Victor is a Microsoft infrastructure engineer with twenty years of experience who founded the site in London in 2014 to write about domain controller repair, PowerShell, and laptop reviews. Today old articles like "How to Fix a Tombstoned Domain Controller" still sit under /guides/, 2,476 posts in total.

### Who bought it

The new owner is Yorker Media, founded by Ratnesh Kumar. On his personal page he wrote that he grew up in a village in Bihar with no computer science degree, started a tech YouTube channel and blog while still in school in 2017, and "earned nothing for two years and kept publishing anyway." In 2018 he launched TechYorker, "until one mistake wiped out most of its traffic overnight." His takeaway: "Build assets you own, not gigs," and "compound slowly, then suddenly break out."

Yorker Media's website lists 35 sites, and iTechGuides is one of them, with itechFAQs.com also on the list, so they were apparently bought together (inference; no sale announcement found). No public record of the change of hands exists either: the public revenue page lists iTechGuides' founding date as 2026-06-19, the mid-July snapshot already shows a new theme, and from late August to September the homepage was fully switched to a software directory. So the takeover likely happened around June.

### How much it grew

| Date | Global rank |
|---|---|
| 2026-07-30 | About 680k people |
| 2026-08-20 | About 355k people |
| 2026-09-03 | About 207k people |
| 2026-10-15 | About 130k people |
| 2026-11-05 | About 95k people |

Rankings are a 30-day rolling average and lag real traffic by one to two weeks, so real growth started around late July and early August. In mid-to-late September it hovered around the 170k mark, then climbed again from October, still rising slightly each day into early November. Per Chrome real-user data, it was not in the global top 1M in June but entered it in September. It reached the top 100k in the Philippines and the top 500k in more than a dozen countries including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and India. Users are spread across many countries, which points to real traffic rather than manufactured traffic.

Absolute figures come from only two self-reported sources: Yorker Media's website says iTechGuides had 30k visitors in the last 386 days, and the founder's X bio claims "close to 1M pageviews a month" across the network.

### Where users come from: an old domain plus a huge number of long-tail pages

No sign of paid advertising was found, and no one is discussing it on social media or Reddit. Nearly all traffic comes from search, relying on two things:

**First, an old domain.** The site has been around since 11, so its backlinks and indexing are already in place. Third-party tools put its domain rating between 45 and 56. The new owner didn't build from scratch; they layered new pages on top of the old authority.

**Second, sheer page volume.** The homepage reads "85,950 tools across 4,648 directories", "128,274 comparisons", "updated daily". The editorial policy page says, verbatim, "Research and first drafts use automated tools". The 80% score comes from "editorial rankings", 20% from a fact-scoring sheet. About ten days ago the homepage said 34k tools; it has more than doubled since, and the pages are still being generated in bulk. Some of the generated comparison pages are forced, with titles like "Reddit vs Adalysis" and "SpyFu vs Reddit" showing up in search results.

Part of the growth also comes from AI search. Structured pages like "Hostinger Web Hosting Review (2026): Pricing, Pros & Cons", with a year in the title and a price table, are well suited to being cited by AI. In the October hosting-category citation chart from LLM Authority Index, a third-party tracker, iTechGuides ranked #28:48 for citations, with Grok citing it 29 times, Kimi 11 times and Perplexity 3 times. How many clicks those citations drive is not visible from outside.

### Where the money comes from: three lines, and only the smallest one is visible

1. **Display ads.** There are over a hundred Raptive (formerly AdThrive) ad codes on the pages. Raptive has a traffic threshold, so being accepted already signals the traffic is there. This is likely the bulk of the revenue, but the amount isn't visible.

2. **Affiliate commissions.** The "Visit" buttons use affiliate links; the policy page states, "Some Visit buttons are affiliate links."

3. **Selling to software vendors.** This is the most interesting part: every slot has a published price, orders are self-serve, and there's no need to talk to sales.

| What you buy | Pricing |
|---|---|
| Listing in a directory (with a do-follow link) | From $49/mo |
| Chart positions #1 to #5 | $59–149/month, also available billed annually or as a one-time purchase |
| Brand page | $29/mo |
| Editorial review | From $149/mo |
| A "sponsored alternative" placement on competitor pages | $49/mo |
| Listed across 35 sites at once | $499/mo |
| Exclusive ownership of a category | From $2,999/mo |

(itechguides.com and yorkermedia.com pages, 11-07)

The policy page is blunt: "product sits at the rank that was bought". You buy a position, you get that rank. The ranking page explains: "each position is sold once per chart, nobody can take it during your term, no matter how much they pay", and it goes live within an hour of payment. Payments run through Dodo Payments, which accepts UPI in India.

This line has public numbers: September $573, October $2,535, and $1,925 over the last 30 days (from TrustMRR, a public revenue page that only counts this one payment channel, 11-07). Ad and affiliate money isn't included, so real total revenue should be much higher (estimate, cannot be verified).

### Why this isn't a one-site story

Yorker Media's 35 sites run on the same template, the same price list and the same checkout. Pull a few of them up and look at their global ranks:

| Site | Early August | Early November |
|---|---|---|
| itechguides.com | About 670k people | About 95k people |
| techyorker.com | About 990k people | About 123k people |
| geekchamp.com | About 540k people | About 127k people |
| positioniseverything.net | About 148k people | About 75k people |
| rottenwifi.com | Top 1M | About 147k people |
| documentarytube.com | About 700k people | About 274k people |

From August to November, more than 15 sites in this network rose together. positioniseverything.net was originally a well-known CSS compatibility bug site from the 2000s, with a huge backlink profile; freedom251.com was the domain name of a famous "251-rupee phone" in India. From the names alone, this looks like a batch of bought old and expired domains. iTechGuides is just the one that grew the fastest.

### Who it's competing with

For readers, it has no advantage over the alternatives. G2 and Capterra have real user reviews, AlternativeTo has community votes, and iTechGuides only has an "editorial score", and its rankings can be bought. In global ranks, G2 sits around #3,800, Capterra around #6,000, and SaaSHub around #22k.

Its strength is on the vendor side. G2 and Capterra require talking to sales and charge per click, which a small SaaS or an indie developer can't afford. iTechGuides costs $49 to $149 a month, you pay by card and it goes live within an hour, and you can bundle across 35 sites. What it really sells is three things: backlinks, rankings, and the chance to be cited by AI. The buyers are software vendors with small budgets. The closest model is SaaSHub, but SaaSHub is a single site run by one indie developer, while iTechGuides sits behind a network of sites.

In the long run, the biggest substitutes are ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews: a user asks "what's the best CRM?" and never clicks through to a list. iTechGuides' response is to turn itself into a citation source for those same AIs.

### The weak point of this playbook

Google's spam policy, updated in March 2024, has three clauses that were practically written against this playbook: scaled content abuse (mass-generated content), expired domain abuse, and selling links that pass ranking signals. iTechGuides hits all three. One core algorithm update or one manual penalty could drop the whole network at once. The founder has already been through this: TechYorker, in his words, "lost most of its traffic overnight over one mistake".

There are also things outsiders can't see: how traffic splits between Google, Bing, AI search and old articles; why the Philippines reaches the top 100k (possibly from old how-to and gaming articles, unverified); and how much was paid for the old domains.

### If it were you

**C: worth learning from, not worth copying.** The playbook itself is real and replicable; 35 sites rising together is the proof. But it depends on bought old domains and on Google not penalizing it for now. If you copy it today, you'll hit the same policy risk, and you'd be competing for the same long-tail keywords against an opponent that already has 200k pages and 35 domains in hand.

**Who it suits** : people already running SEO site networks, holding old domains in the same niche, and ready for traffic to drop. For them, the part worth copying is the slot-selling model: transparent prices, self-serve checkout, one cart across several sites.

**Who it doesn't suit** : indie developers with a single new domain; anyone building a durable product; anyone who can't stomach losing everything to one algorithm update.

**How to do it (if you still want to)** : don't build a "full-category software directory"; that space is already crowded. Pick a narrow vertical with paying vendors (say, local SaaS for one country, tools in one language, or software for a specific industry). Buy an old domain in the same niche with a clean backlink profile, then use structured templates to generate ranking pages, pricing pages and comparison pages, each with verifiable prices and an update date. On the vendor side, copy its SKUs: listings, top-five slots, sponsored alternatives on competitor pages, category exclusivity, all self-serve.

**How to get customers** : readers come from search and AI citations, so write pages in the format AI likes to cite: years in titles, price tables, pros and cons. On the vendor side there's no hard sell needed. Every product listed is a potential buyer, so an email saying "you're at #14, and #3 is still open" is enough.

**How early is early** : this kind of opportunity has no fixed deadline; the window depends on what Google does next. If you move on it, plan for the possibility that it's gone within a year, and aim to recover your costs within six months.

**What would show this read is wrong** : ① over the next two or three months, if Yorker Media's sites keep rising together in global ranks and come through a Google core update, the playbook is tougher than expected and worth scaling up; ② conversely, if they all get cut in half after an update, the risk has materialized and this path should be avoided; ③ if its public vendor revenue climbs above five figures a month, it means demand for "selling rankings to small vendors" is bigger than it looks and could be a business on its own.

[Website ↗](https://itechguides.com)

**Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report**

Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| G2 | Web | 2012 | Tranco 3,824 | G2 relies on real user reviews and buyer intent data; iTechGuides has no reviews, so it uses editorial scores plus paid rankings |
| Capterra / GetApp / Software Advice(Gartner) | Web | 1999/2013/2005 | Tranco 6,092 / 32,505 / 19,153 | Gartner-style listings are pay-per-click and sold by a sales team; iTechGuides is $49–149 a month, self-serve, live in 2 days |
| SourceForge / Slashdot | Web | 1999 | Tranco 250 / 2,658 | An established directory with reviews, several orders of magnitude larger in scale |
| SaaSHub | Web | About 2015 | Tranco 21,975, rising over the last 90 days | Same programmatic alternatives and comparison model, the closest match; SaaSHub is a single site, while iTechGuides sits behind a network of 35 sites with a cross-site cart |
| AlternativeTo | Web | 2009 | Tranco 16,596 | Community votes pick the alternatives; iTechGuides turns the alternative slot on competitor pages into a $49-a-month product |
| SoftwareSuggest / SaaSworthy / Crozdesk | Web | 2014–2016 | Tranco 64,761 / 135,166 / 101,802 | Also an India-based SaaS directory; iTechGuides has fully public pricing, self-serve checkout and cross-site bundles |
| Futurepedia / There's An AI For That | Web | 2022–2023 | Tranco 135,156 / 27,822 | Covers only AI tools; iTechGuides covers all software categories and started on old domains |
| ChatGPT / Perplexity / Google AI Overviews | Big-company features | 2023– | — | Directly answers "best X" queries and is a substitute; iTechGuides instead makes its pages citation sources for these engines |

Where users come from

- **Confirmed** **Old domain + programmatic SEO** : itechguides is an old blog from 2014 (Wayback shows it as Victor Ashiedu's blog in 2026-05). After the change of ownership, it added 4,648 rankings, 86k product pages and 128k comparison pages. The policy page admits first drafts are auto-generated. Tranco rose around the time the pages went live.

- **Confirmed** **AI answer engine citations (GEO)** : #28 in the LLM Authority Index hosting-category citation chart for 2026-10, with 48 citations across 6 platforms (Grok 29, Kimi 11, Perplexity 3)

- **Confirmed** **site network with identical templates / interlinking** : Yorker Media runs 35 sites with the same pricing and template; techyorker, geekchamp, rottenwifi, positioniseverything and others all climbed over the same 8–November period (traffic database)

- Inferred **Traffic from old blog how-to content** : 2,476 older guides are still on the site; the Philippines' top 100k CrUX placement may come from this (unverified)

- Inferred **Paid advertising** : googleads library shows no_ads; no Meta or TikTok campaigns seen

## Why itechguides.com (iTechGuides) shows up

> Channel: web (Tranco rise recall, pool C1: matched in indie / googleads libraries). Research date 2026-11-07.

### One line

a English Windows/IT how-to blog that started in 2014, run by Victor Ashiedu (London/Nigeria), was acquired in mid-2026 by **Yorker Media** (founder Ratnesh Kumar), a small digital publisher in Bihar, India. The new owner turned it into a **programmatic software-directory site** : 4,648 "Best X Software" lists, 85,950 tool pages, and 128,274 "A vs B" comparison pages, with content drafted by automation tools, then monetized with Raptive display ads, affiliate links, and openly sold ranking slots (#1–#5 for $59–149 a month) and do-follow backlinks. The traffic comes from **the old domain's authority plus a huge long tail of pages capturing organic search (and citations from AI answer engines)** , not from paid acquisition, and not from anything special about the product. And this isn't a one-off: 35 other sites in the same network use the same template and are climbing at the same time.

### 1. Data: how much did it actually grow?

**Tranco rank** (our traffic library, 30-day rolling average):

| Date | Rank |
|---|---|
| 2026-07-30 | 679,836 |
| 2026-08-06 | 670,776 |
| 2026-08-13 | 581,611 |
| 2026-08-20 | 355,303 |
| 2026-09-03 | 206,882 |
| 2026-10-01 | 165,413 |
| 2026-10-15 | 130,434 |
| 2026-11-05 | 95,121 |

- The traffic inflection point came in mid-August. Tranco lags real traffic by 1–2 weeks, so real traffic probably started climbing in late July or early August. It flattened around #170k in mid-to-late September, then rose again from October and is still edging up daily.

- **CrUX** (Chrome real-user data): globally, 2026-08 and 2026-09 are both in the top 500k to top 1M range; the Philippines is in the top 100k; the US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam and South Korea are all in the top 500k. Real users spread across many countries helps rule out a rise produced by DNS or API traffic inflation.

- **Self-reported traffic** : Yorker Media's site page says iTechGuides had **386K visitors** between 2026-09-26 and 10-25, using their own stats (https://yorkermedia.com/sites). The founder's X bio says "close to 1M page views a month, DR 45" (Jina search snippet, x.com/ratneshkumar684). The DR shown on TrustMRR is 56.

- **Revenue (TrustMRR, counts only merchant payments collected through Dodo Payments)** : 2026-09 $573,2026-10 $2,535,30 days $1,925, MRR $353,3 subscriptions, self-reported founding date 2026-06-19 (indie library, scraped 2026-11-07). Display ad and affiliate commission income is not included in this figure.

### 2. What it is and how it changed

- **Original form** : itechguides.com was a blog Victor Ashiedu started 2014/2015 years ago, covering Windows, AD and PowerShell how-tos and gadget reviews (Tracxn: London, founded 2014, founder Victor Ashiedu). The 2026-05-13 Wayback snapshot still had the title "How-to guides, technology explained, reviews", and the sidebar listed Sister Sites VictorAshiedu.com, ilifeguides.com and itechFAQs.com.

- **Change of hands** : The 2026-07-16 Wayback snapshot already had a new theme ("Start here / The latest guide on the route") but the old articles were still up. The Aug 19 snapshot was still a blog. The founding date on TrustMRR is 2026-06-19. From this, the likely timeline is that Yorker Media took over around June, and in late August to September rebuilt the homepage as a software directory. The sister site itechfaqs.com is now on Yorker Media's 35-site list, which suggests they were bought together (this is an inference; no acquisition announcement was found).

- **Now** : The homepage reads "Find the right software, ranked by editors. 85,950 tools across 4,648 directories". The editorial policy says in its own words "Research and first drafts use automated tools under these editorial rules". Scores are 80% from "editor ranking" and 20% from a factual scoring sheet (https://www.itechguides.com/best/editorial-policy/). The recall card noted 34k tools and 4,545 directories at the time; about ten days later the tool count had more than doubled, showing the pages are still being generated in bulk.

- **Comparison pages are clearly padded** : search results show machine-generated comparison pages such as "Reddit vs Adalysis" and "SpyFu vs Reddit (PPC software)" (Jina search results).

### 3. Where the money comes from (three lines)

1. **Display ads** : The page HTML has 142 `adthrive` and Raptive tags (scraped from /best/crm-software/). Raptive has a traffic threshold, so this is the main direct channel for monetizing traffic and is probably the largest revenue source (amount unverified).

2. **Affiliate links** : The "Visit" button goes to `/go/<product>/` with `rel="sponsored"` (101 instances on one page). The policy page states "Some Visit buttons are affiliate links".

3. **Selling to software vendors** (the only part visible on TrustMRR): listing from $49/month with do-follow links (in the submit page's words); rank slots #1–#5 at $59/79/69/99/149 per month; brand page $29/month; editorial review $149/month; "sponsored alternative" on competitor pages $49/month; sponsored article from $59; Launch of the day $299 one-time; listing across 35 sites $499/month; exclusive category ownership from $2,999/month. All sites have the same prices, one cart checks out everything, payments run through Dodo Payments, and UPI is supported (https://yorkermedia.com).

The policy page says "Bought places stand at the number bought". In other words, the ranking itself is the product.

### 4. Where users come from (growth tactics)

| Channel | Evidence | Confirmed? |
|---|---|---|
| Old domain authority + programmatic SEO (long tail: "best X software", "A vs B", "X pricing") | 11-year-old domain, DR 45–56; 4,648 lists, 86k product pages and 128k comparison pages rolled out at once; Tranco traffic climbed around the time the pages went live. | Confirmed (mechanism); no data on keyword distribution. |
| AI answer engine citations (GEO) | In the LLM Authority Index's 2026 October "Shared and Small Business Web Hosting" citation ranking, it placed #28: 48 citations across 6/7 platforms, including Grok 29, Kimi 11 and Perplexity 3. The cited pages were structured ones like /products/…/pricing and review pages. | Confirmed (it is being cited); how much traffic that brings is unknown. |
| Interlinking within the network / copying the same template | Yorker Media runs 35 sites with the same prices and template, and the homepages link to each other. techyorker, positioniseverything, geekchamp, rottenwifi and others climbed in the same period (see table below). | Simultaneous climb confirmed; the link-equity contribution from interlinking is unverified. |
| Legacy blog traffic | Old articles (Windows fixes, "why Roblox/Hulu keeps breaking") are still under /guides/, 2,476 posts in total. | Existence confirmed; share unknown. The top-100k placement in the Philippines may come from this how-to and gaming traffic (unverified). |
| Paid acquisition | The googleads library shows no_ads; no Meta or TikTok ads seen. | No evidence of paid promotion found. |
| Social / media / KOLs | The x-radar corpus has no hits for itechguides, techyorker or ratneshkumar684; no discussion on Reddit either. | None found |

**Same network, rising at the same time** (Tranco ranks from the traffic library; blank means not in the top 1M):

| Domain | 08-06 | 09-03 | 10-01 | 11-05 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| positioniseverything.net | 147,797 | 115,871 | 105,113 | 75,468 |
| itechguides.com | 670,776 | 206,882 | 165,413 | 95,121 |
| umatechnology.org | 245,853 | 247,962 | 114,465 | 120,449 |
| techyorker.com | 986,565 | 633,528 | 423,804 | 123,310 |
| geekchamp.com | 542,322 | 353,595 | 230,343 | 127,184 |
| techbloat.com | 154,309 | 174,280 | 178,633 | 132,861 |
| rottenwifi.com | – | – | 509,926 | 146,952 |
| cloudspress.com | – | – | – | 171,414 |
| macmyths.com | – | – | – | 210,601 |
| freedom251.com | – | – | 627,044 | 233,964 |
| mefmobile.org | – | – | 583,099 | 269,438 |
| documentarytube.com | 696,092 | 617,308 | 508,946 | 274,218 |
| itechfaqs.com | – | – | – | 295,864 |
| sekin.in | – | – | – | 326,262 |
| howpremium.com | – | – | – | 359,668 |

Bottom line: these sites all rose together, which means there's a playbook you can copy. itechguides is just the one with the biggest jump. positioniseverything.net was a well-known CSS/IE bug site back in the 2000s and had lots of backlinks. Domains like samsungmobileuspress.com and freedom251.com (the infamous 251-rupee phone scam in India) look like bought or expired domains from the name alone.

### 5. Competitors

| Competitors | Type | Launched | Scale (Tranco 2026-11-05) | How it differs from iTechGuides |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| G2 | Web | 2012 | 3,824 | Sells real user reviews and buyer-intent data to vendors and raised a lot of money; iTechGuides has no user reviews and relies on an "editor score" plus paid placements. |
| Capterra / GetApp / Software Advice(Gartner) | Web | 1999 / 2013 / 2005 | 6,092 / 32,505 / 19,153 | Pay-per-click (PPC) plus real reviews; iTechGuides is a flat monthly fee, self-serve checkout, live in 2 days, priced one or two orders of magnitude lower. |
| SourceForge / Slashdot software directories | Web | 1999 | 250 / 2,658 | Long-established directories with reviews and vendor ads; several orders of magnitude larger in scale. |
| TrustRadius | Web | 2012 | 20,078 | Heavy B2B reviews; iTechGuides has no review system. |
| AlternativeTo | Web | 2009 | 16,596 | Community-voted "alternatives"; iTechGuides sells "sponsored alternative" slots and turns that position into a product. |
| SaaSHub | Web | Around 2015 | 21,975 (also rising in the last 90 days) | An indie-built programmatic alternatives/comparison site; the model is closest, though SaaSHub is a single site while iTechGuides is backed by a matrix of 35 sites. |
| SoftwareSuggest / SaaSworthy / Crozdesk | Web | 2014–2016 | 64,761 / 135,166 / 101,802 | An Indian SaaS directory selling leads and recommendation slots; iTechGuides has fully public pricing, self-serve purchase, and cross-site bundling. |
| Futurepedia / There's An AI For That | Web | 2022–2023 | 135,156 / 27,822 | An AI tool directory selling featured slots; iTechGuides covers software across all categories and starts from an old domain. |
| ChatGPT / Perplexity / Google AI Overviews | Big-company features | 2023– | — | Answers "best CRM" directly and is a substitute; but iTechGuides flips this by making its structured pages the citation sources these engines use. |

### 6. Why it worked (breakdown)

1. **Bought an old domain, skipping cold start** : itechguides has 11 years of history and already had backlinks and an index footprint. The new owner did not build a site from zero and instead rolled out pages on top of the old authority (evidence: Wayback shows 2026-05 was still Victor Ashiedu's blog; TrustMRR founding date 2026-06-19).

2. **Automation pushed page count into the 200k range at once** : 4,648 lists × 86k products × 128k comparison pages, and the editorial policy admits first drafts are auto-generated. Long-tail coverage exploded, and Tranco went from 670k to 95k.

3. **Page structure suits AI engine citations** : pricing pages and structured pages like "X Review (2026): Pricing, Pros & Cons" get cited by Grok, Kimi, Perplexity and others (ranked #28 in the LLM Authority Index hosting category).

4. **The same playbook was copied across 35 sites** , and the whole thing worked: more than 15 sites in the network rose together during 8–November, so this was not a fluke.

5. **Short monetization chain** : traffic goes to Raptive ads, long-tail clicks go to affiliates, and vendors buy slots self-serve. On TrustMRR, merchant payments went from $573 in September to $2,535 in October, and one cart can check out across 35 sites.

### 7. Differentiation

- For readers, it is no different in essence from G2, Capterra or SaaSHub, and arguably weaker: there are no user reviews, the ratings mainly come from the "editor score", and rankings can be bought. **Reader-side differentiation is not why it took off.**

- The real differentiation is on the **supply side and the vendor side** : (a) using old domains and automation to churn out a page count on the scale of G2 cheaply; (b) public, fixed pricing for vendors at $49–149 per month, self-serve checkout, live in 2 days, bundled across 35 sites at one price. That is a price point and speed that G2 and Capterra's sales-led model cannot match, and it fits the demand of SaaS companies and indie developers with small budgets who want to buy backlinks, buy rankings, or buy "AI citation placement"; (c) deliberately doing GEO, formatting pages for the kinds of answers AI engines like to cite.

- It took off mainly because of (a). (b) determines whether traffic turns into money, and (c) is the increment.

### 8. Visibility and copycats

- **Visibility** : The revenue is public on TrustMRR, but the amounts are small ($1,925 over 30 days). The x-radar corpus has zero mentions, and no discussion turned up on Reddit or in the media. The founder's X account has only about 812 followers. Almost nobody outside the niche knows about it; only SEO and site-network circles understand the playbook.

- **Copycats** : I found no clear external copies. It copied itself 30 times across the web (techbloat, umatechnology, macmyths, laptop251, sekin.in, and more). "Old domain + AI programmatic directory + selling rankings" has been a common SEO play for 2025–2026 years, with a low barrier to entry, so it's easy to copy.

### 9. Takeaways

- Buy older domains in the same niche with existing history instead of building from zero; generate pages in bulk from structured templates (lists, product pages, pricing pages, A vs B).

- Package rank slots, listings, alternative placements and category naming as transparently priced, self-serve SKUs with one cart across sites, so no sales team is needed.

- Format pages for AI answer engines (dated titles, pricing tables, Pros/Cons) and keep tracking GEO citations.

- Copy the same template across several sites to spread single-site risk.

### 10. Risks and uncertainties

- **High Google risk** : This playbook falls squarely under Google's "scaled content abuse", "expired domain abuse" and "site reputation abuse" policies (spam policies in effect since March 2024), and selling do-follow links also violates the link policy. One core update or manual action could wipe out traffic across the whole network. The founder himself wrote about TechYorker: "one mistake wiped out most of its traffic overnight" (ratneshkumar.com/about).

- No traffic source breakdown: I don't know how much comes from Google, Bing, AI engines or old articles, and I don't know why the Philippines made the top 100k either.

- No public record of the acquisition date or price. The June ownership change is inferred from the Wayback Machine and TrustMRR.

- No data on Raptive ad revenue or affiliate income, so real total revenue could be well above what TrustMRR shows.

### Sources

- Our database: traffic (rank_day, crux_domain, 2026-11-05 chart), indie (TrustMRR profile itechguides, 2026-11-07 scrape), googleads (no_ads)

- [www.itechguides.com/](https://www.itechguides.com/), /about-us/, /best/editorial-policy/, /best/crm-software/ (HTML scrape, 2026-11-07)

- [yorkermedia.com/](https://yorkermedia.com/), /sites, /about; [ratneshkumar.com/about](https://ratneshkumar.com/about)

- Wayback Machine: itechguides.com 2026-05-13, 2026-07-16, 2026-08-19 snapshots

- [trustmrr.com/startup/itechguides](https://trustmrr.com/startup/itechguides) ;[tracxn.com/d/companies/itechguides/…](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/itechguides/…)

- [llmauthorityindex.com/citations/shared-and-small-business-we…](https://llmauthorityindex.com/citations/shared-and-small-business-web-hosting/domains/itechguides.com)

- LinkedIn / Instagram / YouTube search snippets: Ratnesh Kumar (founder of Yorker Media, Gopalganj, Bihar; TechYorker founded 2018 years ago)

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.