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We actually haven't touched TrailBehind in well over a year. We switched to developing iOS and Android apps, and we never looked back. We do still use the Trai

We actually haven't touched TrailBehind in well over a year. We switched to developing iOS and Android apps, and we never looked back. We do still use the TrailBehind data in our apps, and that's one of the main things that differentiates our apps against competitors. But we pivoted because there was no money in TrailBehind.

revorad 16y ago
Were you trying to sell web subscriptions before you turned to mobile apps?
- andrewljohnson 16y ago
  Nope, we got the site up to 1000 uniques a day. Then we put some ads up. After determining that even if we could 10X our ad returns and 100X our traffic, we'd still be making pretty paltry money, we switched away. I suppose we could have tried to be more like Trails.com, but the site is pretty much a search engine, so we didn't "own" any data besides the index. We just linked through to the appropriate reports about places. If I ever get some time, I'd love to revive and finish TrailBehind. It was my first big programming project, and it was growing, but there was just no money. It still gets tons of visits everyday. Turn off Javascript and you'll see we did some interesting SEO stuff.
  - revorad 16y ago
    If you mean Google ads, then that sounds like a common story. Did you try approaching advertisers directly? One thing I hardly see anyone do, instead of just running CPC/CPM ads, is actually sell products related to their apps. For example, considering you've already got a site with good traffic, you could create your own niche store of sorts, in which you sell products of interest to your audience. That could include your own mobile apps, other complementary apps, physical goods. You could also sell well-thought out bundles of such products, so that you are not competing with big discount sites which can sell single items for cheap. Offer people good products with convenience and awesome customer service, ride the social network craziness and you could do quite well.
    - andrewljohnson 16y ago
      Yeah, we had all of those thoughts. It's just a lot of work, and we also wanted to be writing software, not calling people about ads. We do advertise our mobile apps on the site now. We tried the following kinds of ads: * AdSense * a home-brewed system that recommended Amazon maps/books based on the map * ads for our apps * ads for custom topo maps of the area in view from MyTopo (These worked the best) We really haven't been unhappy with our decision. There's a lot of money in the mobile space, and we have even mostly pivoted away from hiking. We have our hiking apps, but we also license our mapping platform to other companies and collect royalties. We power everything from flying and boating, to hiking and wine-country apps now. My only regret is not pivoting from TrailBehind faster!

revorad 16y ago

Were you trying to sell web subscriptions before you turned to mobile apps?

andrewljohnson 16y ago
Nope, we got the site up to 1000 uniques a day. Then we put some ads up. After determining that even if we could 10X our ad returns and 100X our traffic, we'd still be making pretty paltry money, we switched away. I suppose we could have tried to be more like Trails.com, but the site is pretty much a search engine, so we didn't "own" any data besides the index. We just linked through to the appropriate reports about places. If I ever get some time, I'd love to revive and finish TrailBehind. It was my first big programming project, and it was growing, but there was just no money. It still gets tons of visits everyday. Turn off Javascript and you'll see we did some interesting SEO stuff.
- revorad 16y ago
  If you mean Google ads, then that sounds like a common story. Did you try approaching advertisers directly? One thing I hardly see anyone do, instead of just running CPC/CPM ads, is actually sell products related to their apps. For example, considering you've already got a site with good traffic, you could create your own niche store of sorts, in which you sell products of interest to your audience. That could include your own mobile apps, other complementary apps, physical goods. You could also sell well-thought out bundles of such products, so that you are not competing with big discount sites which can sell single items for cheap. Offer people good products with convenience and awesome customer service, ride the social network craziness and you could do quite well.
  - andrewljohnson 16y ago
    Yeah, we had all of those thoughts. It's just a lot of work, and we also wanted to be writing software, not calling people about ads. We do advertise our mobile apps on the site now. We tried the following kinds of ads: * AdSense * a home-brewed system that recommended Amazon maps/books based on the map * ads for our apps * ads for custom topo maps of the area in view from MyTopo (These worked the best) We really haven't been unhappy with our decision. There's a lot of money in the mobile space, and we have even mostly pivoted away from hiking. We have our hiking apps, but we also license our mapping platform to other companies and collect royalties. We power everything from flying and boating, to hiking and wine-country apps now. My only regret is not pivoting from TrailBehind faster!