What to do with a site that accidentally got popular?
4 few years ago a friend and I made www.turntubelist.com to scratch a personal itch. We've never tried to advertise it or push it anywhere but overtime the users slowly climbed from 50 hits a day, to 100, to 150... but then 6 months ago something happened. I dunno what, but it happened from Brazil, and then Japan then kind of everywhere - 6000+ visits a day for weeks. It's settled down now - about 1500 visits a day... but the people who use it have a REALLY long average-time-on-site: 26 minutes, according to Google Analytics.
There's no ads up there at the moment, which would be the obvious thing - but because it's all client-side it would be hard(er) to get relevant ads (like for the songs the user is searching for etc).
Anyhooo.... What would you do with it?
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What you do have is validation that you have something going on there, now you need to analyze what that something is and if there is a way to get it to grow to a substantial multiple of what you have today.
So, what I would do with it is analyze the crap out of it to see if it has (autonomous) potential for further growth.
You also need to figure out why it dropped again.
Not everything you do has to have a revenue model. I know that for me, that's what I miss about the early days of the web.
I don't know the OP's financial situation, but I think the idea of cost recovery on two digits is so short-sighted. I shudder to think of all of the missed opportunity costs of not providing awesome things to people.
The majority of my "luck" in life has come from doing things just because I enjoy them.
The OP is already getting paid in reputation, whether he acknowledges it or not.
I could see this being a great tool for VJ mashups, especially at 720p.
Start pitching it to news sites and the like, because there's a very high chance it'll turn into something bigger than just something to scratch an itch. Create a Facebook page; start gaining fans. Same with Twitter. Increase the presence of your site.
Very cool product, good luck! You can always email me if you need help. :)
I would suggest potentially growing the market for the product. I've made a similar thing before when the youtube api first came out, but not quite as polished. I like the concept, but you could take it further.
You only have to look at youtube doubler to see how popular some of these sites can get.
More to the point, why does it matter?
Might be worth having a quick FAQ show up when a user creates a new account to cover the basics like this.