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I tried this same experiment with pligg on a site I put up, freenormous.com (free samples and offers). I found that almost no one posted, even after I worked h

by ericb 18y ago

I tried this same experiment with pligg on a site I put up, freenormous.com (free samples and offers). I found that almost no one posted, even after I worked hard to get traffic and spent money on adwords. Now I get postings--they're just all SEO and spam. It is very tough to build a community. I spent a lot of time talking to myself under different usernames. Only around 1% of users will post (maybe less, from my experience). I also found that even with 1000 visitors a month, I was making less than $5 per month with adsense. That would be fine if it didn't take a continual flow of real posts to build content, but it does. This soured me on adwords based based businesses, and even moreso on any business that requires a network effect to work. Now I focus on business models that offer value even when there are no other users. It was an educational experiment, though, and for the time investment, gave a good return on enlightenment.

pxlpshr 18y ago
Couldn't agree more with you re: building a community, which is one of my main concerns with a big project I'm trying to raise money for as it relies directly on critical mass for match-making (not dating related). Thanks for your feedback. Like you I've already learned a lot from this -- have spent a good deal of time researching ad-based revenue. For $100 worth of hosting fees, and my time for a few days -- most definitely worth it.
- josefresco 18y ago
  I hope you're not paying $100/month to host a Pligg site with almost no traffic.
  - pxlpshr 18y ago
    Yes, I'm paying $100 a month and have 30 days to decide if it's worth it. Meaning, I have 30 days to drive traffic to it at which point I'm not going to invest much more time into the site, scale back on infrastructure, and let the site grow via search. I'd rather be prepared than scrambling.
    - josefresco 18y ago
      You have your own box hopefully? $100 is about right then if that's the case.
      - jonknee 18y ago
        It's hosted at Media Temple, so it looks like it's a VPS.
    - dkokelley 18y ago
      If you've only got 30 days to get this site up to speed, you'll want to do something big. Do something outrageous, then submit a press release. Get all of your friends to create accounts and post "just for fun," and then claim in the press release that this is the next big thing. This advice in pretty generic, I know. What I'm trying to say is that you want to see growth similar to the million dollar home page or the ebay add where someone sold advertising space on his head for a month and it took off. In both of these cases the concept was not particularly novel or even useful, but the media caught on because it was interesting and the ROI for advertisers in both cases was much higher than it would have been on its own (how many people would normally see a forehead in a month?). Basically, a dating advice site can't stand on its own feet after only 30 days, but if you create a story that the media loves then you should see exponential growth.
      - pxlpshr 18y ago
        I feel ya... and yeah, I'm giving myself roughly 30 days in regard to how much attention and funds I drop into the site. If after 30 days there is decent growth but it can't self sustain yet, I'm not going to cut my losses quite so soon and will move forward another 30 days. However, there is a tipping point where this project will get pushed to the backburner if up-take just isn't happening. Mostly because I need to focus on income generation (finding more freelance work) so I don't have to take a desk job. :)
jamiequint 18y ago
"I also found that even with 1000 visitors a month, I was making less than $5 per month with adsense. That would be fine if it didn't take a continual flow of real posts to build content, but it does. This soured me on adwords based based businesses" $5/month for 1000 monthly visitors is not bad for ads in general. Assuming maybe 10% of those visitors are really active and the others are just one off hits (1-2 pageviews) you're looking at about 5000 pageviews/month which would equate to $1 eCPM on AdSense, which is actually a pretty decent ad network eCPM.
- ericb 18y ago
  I wasn't thinking it was bad for adsense. I was thinking it was a bad price for my time... It took a lot of hours to create the content, and was difficult to get others to create it on their own.

by ericb 18y ago

pxlpshr 18y ago

Couldn't agree more with you re: building a community, which is one of my main concerns with a big project I'm trying to raise money for as it relies directly on critical mass for match-making (not dating related). Thanks for your feedback. Like you I've already learned a lot from this -- have spent a good deal of time researching ad-based revenue. For $100 worth of hosting fees, and my time for a few days -- most definitely worth it.

josefresco 18y ago
I hope you're not paying $100/month to host a Pligg site with almost no traffic.
- pxlpshr 18y ago
  Yes, I'm paying $100 a month and have 30 days to decide if it's worth it. Meaning, I have 30 days to drive traffic to it at which point I'm not going to invest much more time into the site, scale back on infrastructure, and let the site grow via search. I'd rather be prepared than scrambling.
  - josefresco 18y ago
    You have your own box hopefully? $100 is about right then if that's the case.
    - jonknee 18y ago
      It's hosted at Media Temple, so it looks like it's a VPS.
  - dkokelley 18y ago
    If you've only got 30 days to get this site up to speed, you'll want to do something big. Do something outrageous, then submit a press release. Get all of your friends to create accounts and post "just for fun," and then claim in the press release that this is the next big thing. This advice in pretty generic, I know. What I'm trying to say is that you want to see growth similar to the million dollar home page or the ebay add where someone sold advertising space on his head for a month and it took off. In both of these cases the concept was not particularly novel or even useful, but the media caught on because it was interesting and the ROI for advertisers in both cases was much higher than it would have been on its own (how many people would normally see a forehead in a month?). Basically, a dating advice site can't stand on its own feet after only 30 days, but if you create a story that the media loves then you should see exponential growth.
    - pxlpshr 18y ago
      I feel ya... and yeah, I'm giving myself roughly 30 days in regard to how much attention and funds I drop into the site. If after 30 days there is decent growth but it can't self sustain yet, I'm not going to cut my losses quite so soon and will move forward another 30 days. However, there is a tipping point where this project will get pushed to the backburner if up-take just isn't happening. Mostly because I need to focus on income generation (finding more freelance work) so I don't have to take a desk job. :)

jamiequint 18y ago

"I also found that even with 1000 visitors a month, I was making less than $5 per month with adsense. That would be fine if it didn't take a continual flow of real posts to build content, but it does. This soured me on adwords based based businesses" $5/month for 1000 monthly visitors is not bad for ads in general. Assuming maybe 10% of those visitors are really active and the others are just one off hits (1-2 pageviews) you're looking at about 5000 pageviews/month which would equate to $1 eCPM on AdSense, which is actually a pretty decent ad network eCPM.

ericb 18y ago
I wasn't thinking it was bad for adsense. I was thinking it was a bad price for my time... It took a lot of hours to create the content, and was difficult to get others to create it on their own.