8 ms·

Ask HN/PG: How long does it take a social news site to live on it's own?

23 points by iamelgringo 17y ago

So, I soft launched my economic and financial social news site, http://Newsley.com two months ago. So far, I've had around 500 uniques and I've served around 2000 pages. I'm fairly happy with that start, but I have no idea what to expect in terms of traffic and growth. The vibe that I get is that at some point, the site will reach a critical mass, and then the community will take on a life of it's own. How long does it take to get to that point? I know sometimes it's never. I'd love to hear some anecdotes from people in similar situations. My guess is that it takes about a year. I've been looking at the internet archive of Reddit: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://reddit.com and it seems like it took them about a year to have people comment on articles on a regular basis. I'd love to hear some thoughts, experiences, from people who were in similar situations. And, any tips along the way on getting to the first 5k users, would be greatly appreciated.

kyro 17y ago
Well, posting this here will definitely generate a bit more traffic for you. I've been looking for an economics-centered version of HN for the past few weeks, and seeing as how newmogul isn't being run anymore, your site becomes an appealing candidate. However, the design makes for a somewhat unpleasant experience, so a few suggestions would be to back off the italics and big bolding, go for sans-serif fonts, and color some of the supplemental informational text lighter shades of gray because with everything just black now, the site looks too noisy.
- iamelgringo 17y ago
  The overall impression for you was too noisy. Sorry about that. I'm in the process of slowly refining the design. I wanted to try serif fonts to evoke a sense of old newspapers. And, I went with the black and gray to be a little more "serious". But, now that you mention it, the article titles being a big headline, the excerpt being italicized and the meta information being plain text probably is a bit busy and heavy. I'll have to work on that. Thanks for the feedback. If you have any other feedback, I'd be all ears.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- stevenj 17y ago
  >I've been looking for an economics-centered version of HN for the past few weeks, and seeing as how newmogul isn't being run anymore... markenomics.com is an alternative to NM
  - kyro 17y ago
    Ah cool. Thanks.
  - awa 17y ago
    I wasn't part of NM, so don't know much about it, but markenomics definitely needs a better comments/articles ratio before it takes off, so I think the slot for a HN-economics is still open.
    - stevenj 17y ago
      With time
- andrewljohnson 17y ago
  I like all your suggestions but recommending against serif fonts. What basis do you have for this? Serifed fonts can be easier to read, particularly when there is a lot of text involved.
  - nfnaaron 17y ago
    Serif fonts are easier to read on paper because of the extra clues provided by serif. San serif is easier to read on a screen because screen resolution is not as good as paper. Specific serif fonts may work on screen. I haven't seen an e-ink screen to see if that's different from normal screens. http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=serif+san-serif+screen+paper&n=5 http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=serif+san-serif+...
emmett 17y ago
Calling kn0thing, calling kn0thing...
- kn0thing 17y ago
  Hi, everybody! (Hi, Doctor Nick) We didn't have comments on reddit until mid Dec. 2005 (site launched June of that year) so our 'holy shit this might actually work moment' actually came over that YC summer based on submissions. For the first, say, month, I was actively submitting links under multiple screenames (thanks to a simple little formfield Steve added to our admin submit page - long since removed). Steve did it as well, but he was spending most of his time, you know, building reddit. Seeding a nascent social news site is one of the many unglamorous things the non-programming cofounder does in those crucial early startup months :) as well as browbeating friends and family into contributing as well. But we had a day that summer when neither Steve nor I did anything on reddit except read and vote; I'd like to dig through my email and half-assed journal from that time to give you an exact date, but I haven't got it handy. But it happened within the first 3 months. Why? Well, at the time, we were filling a need that wasn't really satisfied many other places. I don't believe there's any dominant economic/financial social news site out there (I can't even think of any aside from Newsley, well, and /r/economics). So you've got an advantage there in that you don't need to convince people away from a similar resource as much as you need to show them this is just more efficient than how they're getting their news now (editorial-picked front pages). On that note, you should really play up the fact that it's a "Marketplace of ideas and news, where the best bubble up and the worst fall into obscurity." Most folks interested in that space will already have an affinity for the perfection of a free market, which is essentially how these sites work. Of course, like any market, it succumbs to the whims of irrational crowds at times... but that's another post. The other thing that helped us tremendously was getting written up by PG in an essay and more broadly, being the first YC company in the first YC class to launch. Paul and Y Combinator already had a following that was going to take an interest in reddit just because of its association with the two. And when they stuck around, Paul Graham readers tend to be the perfect kind of early users for a social news site you'd like to promote thoughtful news/ideas over, say, the crap on CNN. As for reddit these days, heh, it's rather varied. Oh, and I don't see any kind of stats system for your community. Believe it or not, karma was a huge incentive for our early users, some of whom would let us know the site was broken because stats weren't being calculated properly. It's not what's going to motivate everyone to submit, but for those it resonates with, it's a great incentive. tl;dr It took us only a few months for reddit to be self-sufficient, but that was largely thanks to the YC and PG connection (and his writeup). Since those aren't replicable, I'd suggest getting in touch with someone who is a PG in the finance/economics online world and email her. I suspect you've got some in mind who you already read regularly, so write not as a pitching CEO, but as a reader & fan of her work. It may not go anywhere, but it'll only take a few minutes, and the upside is limitless...
awa 17y ago
Clickable: http://Newsley.com http://Newsley.com
manbearpig 17y ago
Well according to Quantcast, this site now only gets 5.9K US visitors a month, so you might not need even 5K to have a decent site. At its peak HN got around 17.4K. Showing the summary of the story is a REALLY good idea. It's also cool that it gets the summary for you, and you can change it if you want. The font is a bit cramped-together and small. It's pretty unpleasant to look at. What is your bounce rate? I think changing the font to make it initially more comfortable to look at might improve your bounce rate. I don't mean serif to sans-serif. Your font is so serify that it looks italicized. There are lots of lighter serif fonts.
- rokhayakebe 17y ago
  If by "this site" you mean HN, then these numbers are wrong.
- iamelgringo 17y ago
  re: Quantcast: PG said that this site was getting around 40k uniques a day a few months back. re: the font. I'll have to mess around with the fontography and see what I can do. The summaries are italicized right now. Is that what you're referring to? If those are hard to read, I can change that around. re: the summaries. Thanks for the feedback. I thought long and hard about that, and one of the big reasons that I did it, was SEO. I thought that Google would appreciate a few more sentences per link to index and rank a bit better for the keywords I'm targeting. Thanks for the feedback on the summary extraction. I worked pretty long and hard on that one. It's suprisingly challenging. I'm glad it's worked for you so far.
petercooper 17y ago
I launched RubyFlow - a public link blog for Ruby stuff - on April 9, 2008. On the same day, 3 other people posted items. The next day, about 10 others. This kept up for a few weeks but it died down a lot so I picked up the slack, did more promo, and since late 2008 it's basically run itself. The trick? Have a popular site in the niche you can use to promote the heck out of the new site ;-) Stack Overflow is a great example of this technique working on a bigger scale.
sga 17y ago
I'm curious what the monetization strategy is for these types of social news sites (ex. Newsley, Rubyflow, markenomics, etc., etc.). Or is the motivation to do the work to build this type of site (both structurally and in a community sense) born out of strong interest in the subject and perhaps the chance of potential indirect future rewards (networking, jobs, etc.). I ask because I'm interested in a couple of other subject areas and considering building a similar style of site and thus wondering what realistic expectations should be re. the potential for direct monetization.
- iamelgringo 17y ago
  One of the reasons that I picked up the financial/economic news topic was that I did a study on adwords advertising. I bought a list of the top 50,000 paying keywords on Google's Adsense program off of a shady looking site. I then wrote a script to scrape the number of hits on Google for every keyword on the list, and that gave me a ratio of high paying keywords to low hits on Google. The data off the list looked pretty accurate when I spot checked it with my adsense account. There was a huge cluster of keywords on that list that had to do with financial topics. Not only that, but financial services account for 20-25% of all online ad spend. That tells me that there are advertisers that are going to be interested in a niche readership that are interested in economics and financial news. So, my hypothesis is that ad rates for a niche site focused on financial and economic news will be able to use advertising as a revenue stream. To test that hypothesis, I put up some adsense ads two weeks ago, and I got $1 - $1.50 a click. I'm pretty happy with that.
  - sga 17y ago
    Thanks for the insight into your method and thinking. I'll definitely consider this if/when I make an attempt. Best of luck with Newsley.
    - iamelgringo 17y ago
      If you ping me, I'd be happy to send you the spreadsheet of the keywords. My contact info is in my profile.
bugmenot 17y ago
Best of luck with your new site! (By the way, it's = it is.)