4 ms·

How does Twicsy do revenue wise? I would love to hear the story behind it and how you got to that many users.

by wallawe 14y ago

dumbfounder 14y ago
Revenue is abysmal. No decent networks will advertise on Twicsy due to the adult content. Up until about 2 months ago I couldn't even cover server costs with the ad money. As for the story: I launched it back in 2009 as a last ditch effort to save my company (Searchles) and was featured on TechCrunch a few times that first week. But, since then, the coverage has been almost nonexistent. I have relied on organic growth, SEO, and old fashioned, bullheaded persistence since then. It has grown about 5x each of the past 3 years. I have been running it in my spare time since March of 2010, and I am not the world's greatest web developer, so almost all improvements have been on the back end just trying to scale the site. If you are interested in the tech: I run MySQL on a 2TB SSD RAID 5 array, but then I use data caching servers I developed myself to speed up serving the site (some data in memory, most on SSD). The near real time search was also developed by me. Only 4 total servers are used to run the site.
- bemmu 14y ago
  Are you subscribing to the paid Twitter firehose, or how do you get the data? If you could find any feature at all to charge for, you might be surprised to find people signing up. For example you could have "featured tweets" with a retweet button underneath on the right side instead of (or in addition to) the ad block and charge for placement there for people who want their content to be more popular.
- zemo 14y ago
  >No decent networks will advertise on Twicsy due to the adult content. does the "possibly_sensitive" attribute in the Twitter API help at all? I ask because I'm looking into using it on a project, but I don't have enough source data to be able to tell how accurate it is.
  - dumbfounder 14y ago
    This is the first I have heard of it. I am going to check it out.
- Irregardless 14y ago
  There must be a way around that. Imgur's advertising seems to be pretty standard, but they have gigabytes of nude and/or violent photos uploaded on a weekly basis. Would it hurt your traffic too much to not have it displayed so prominently on the front page?
  - dumbfounder 14y ago
    I would display a big picture of a nun on the homepage if it made advertisers happy about the rest of the site. I have been talking to ad people for a while now and I can't seem to get around it. But I will continue to try. I tried some searches on imgur and nothing nasty comes up. On Twicsy it is very easy to get nasty stuff to appear. Looks like imgur uses Google Adsense, they have cut me off several times.
    - Irregardless 14y ago
      Yeah, imgur must have all the NSFW content hidden from their own search. Anyone who knows how to use Reddit will know where to find the NSFW stuff they've swept under the rug though, so I'm surprised that's enough for Adsense to give it the OK -- Reddit users are probably 90%+ of imgur's audience. Maybe you need to do the same thing: set up an "un-affiliated" website that allows you find all the 18+ content on Twicsy, haha
      - dumbfounder 14y ago
        I have thought about it a lot, but the quantity makes it unmanageable. I have over 1.6 billion pics indexed, about 5 million added each day.
  - davidklemke 14y ago
    I believe Imgur gets around it by flagging the NSFW content and then doesn't load the ad display code on it. Not sure how that gels with the AdSense guidelines however but if they're still using AdSense then it can't be that much of a problem.
    - 14y ago
- wmderf 14y ago
  I'm flabbergasted that that much traffic doesn't yield any returns. Do you think it's the same with most one man bands? Do you think it's your user?
  - dumbfounder 14y ago
    It has mostly to do with the fact that decent ad networks won't touch Twicsy. But I also do have a lot of international traffic which is harder to monetize.
    - wmderf 14y ago
      How hard was it to scale the growth? Did you get jumped or were you prepared? Also what are your thoughts on twitters changes to their rules of the road? I'm launching my own 3rd party service and have been warned by some mates. What advice can you give? My answer is 4chan FYI. Although IMO janitors count as staff...
      - dumbfounder 14y ago
        The growth was pretty steady, but I was always extracting the maximum from the hardware I had to save money, so for a long time I had intermittent issues. I also had my own server colo'd for a while, which I do not recommend for a one man shop. It nearly broke me a few times having a server go down and spending all day trying to fix it. I had a sever go down hard 2 days before I got married, but I had to let it go until 2 days after the wedding. I didn't think the site would recover from that. The hardest part was to scale it economically. I have always been a big fan of SSD's, which are instrumental in scaling a site that doesn't have the resources to put data they need fast access to in RAM. For example, a site with more money might use redis to cache all the pics for each user (sorted, unique lists), plus all the tweets that point to a pic, but there is too much for me to do that in RAM without selling organs. Also, redis is not very memory efficient. But the advantage is that technologies like that are easy to use and easy to scale. If you have money. The Twitter rule changes freak me out every day but I have not seen any specific moves that make me think they are after me. It is probably a matter of time, but then you need to think about what form that will take. Will they just cut off the Streaming API? That would be a big move. Will they remove pics from the streaming API? I doubt it. Will they make moves to single me out? That would be weird. Will they come after me with lawyers for caching tweets? I don't see that either. But, while I don't see anything specific, there are a lot of what ifs. My advice is to use Twitter to get off the ground and then move away from Twitter altogether if at all humanly possible. That's the strategy they are forcing with their stupid rules, so maybe they will see the light at some point and rethink their strategy.
- centdev 14y ago
  Thats the tricky part. On the twitter photosharing site (separate project) that I built and maintain, its a constant battle to flag content so that it stays family friendly for advertisers. For flagged media, I show house ads.
- velodrome 14y ago
  I had similar issues with my service. It's hard to keep the service up with no money. Some suggestions: 1) Improving the quality of the site 2) Remove the adult content to attract better ad providers. 3) Look at adding a paid service (for power users) to hedge ad revenue. Be careful not to alienate current users. 4) Focus on a few key things and do them very well.

How does Twicsy do revenue wise? I would love to hear the story behind it and how you got to that many users.

by wallawe 14y ago

How does Twicsy do revenue wise? I would love to hear the story behind it and how you got to that many users.

Revenue is abysmal. No decent networks will advertise on Twicsy due to the adult content. Up until about 2 months ago I couldn't even cover server costs with the ad money. As for the story: I launched it back in 2009 as a last ditch effort to save my company (Searchles) and was featured on TechCrunch a few times that first week. But, since then, the coverage has been almost nonexistent. I have relied on organic growth, SEO, and old fashioned, bullheaded persistence since then. It has grown about 5x each of the past 3 years. I have been running it in my spare time since March of 2010, and I am not the world's greatest web developer, so almost all improvements have been on the back end just trying to scale the site. If you are interested in the tech: I run MySQL on a 2TB SSD RAID 5 array, but then I use data caching servers I developed myself to speed up serving the site (some data in memory, most on SSD). The near real time search was also developed by me. Only 4 total servers are used to run the site.

bemmu 14y ago
Are you subscribing to the paid Twitter firehose, or how do you get the data? If you could find any feature at all to charge for, you might be surprised to find people signing up. For example you could have "featured tweets" with a retweet button underneath on the right side instead of (or in addition to) the ad block and charge for placement there for people who want their content to be more popular.
zemo 14y ago
>No decent networks will advertise on Twicsy due to the adult content. does the "possibly_sensitive" attribute in the Twitter API help at all? I ask because I'm looking into using it on a project, but I don't have enough source data to be able to tell how accurate it is.
- dumbfounder 14y ago
  This is the first I have heard of it. I am going to check it out.
Irregardless 14y ago
There must be a way around that. Imgur's advertising seems to be pretty standard, but they have gigabytes of nude and/or violent photos uploaded on a weekly basis. Would it hurt your traffic too much to not have it displayed so prominently on the front page?
- dumbfounder 14y ago
  I would display a big picture of a nun on the homepage if it made advertisers happy about the rest of the site. I have been talking to ad people for a while now and I can't seem to get around it. But I will continue to try. I tried some searches on imgur and nothing nasty comes up. On Twicsy it is very easy to get nasty stuff to appear. Looks like imgur uses Google Adsense, they have cut me off several times.
  - Irregardless 14y ago
    Yeah, imgur must have all the NSFW content hidden from their own search. Anyone who knows how to use Reddit will know where to find the NSFW stuff they've swept under the rug though, so I'm surprised that's enough for Adsense to give it the OK -- Reddit users are probably 90%+ of imgur's audience. Maybe you need to do the same thing: set up an "un-affiliated" website that allows you find all the 18+ content on Twicsy, haha
    - dumbfounder 14y ago
      I have thought about it a lot, but the quantity makes it unmanageable. I have over 1.6 billion pics indexed, about 5 million added each day.
- davidklemke 14y ago
  I believe Imgur gets around it by flagging the NSFW content and then doesn't load the ad display code on it. Not sure how that gels with the AdSense guidelines however but if they're still using AdSense then it can't be that much of a problem.
  - 14y ago
wmderf 14y ago
I'm flabbergasted that that much traffic doesn't yield any returns. Do you think it's the same with most one man bands? Do you think it's your user?
- dumbfounder 14y ago
  It has mostly to do with the fact that decent ad networks won't touch Twicsy. But I also do have a lot of international traffic which is harder to monetize.
  - wmderf 14y ago
    How hard was it to scale the growth? Did you get jumped or were you prepared? Also what are your thoughts on twitters changes to their rules of the road? I'm launching my own 3rd party service and have been warned by some mates. What advice can you give? My answer is 4chan FYI. Although IMO janitors count as staff...
    - dumbfounder 14y ago
      The growth was pretty steady, but I was always extracting the maximum from the hardware I had to save money, so for a long time I had intermittent issues. I also had my own server colo'd for a while, which I do not recommend for a one man shop. It nearly broke me a few times having a server go down and spending all day trying to fix it. I had a sever go down hard 2 days before I got married, but I had to let it go until 2 days after the wedding. I didn't think the site would recover from that. The hardest part was to scale it economically. I have always been a big fan of SSD's, which are instrumental in scaling a site that doesn't have the resources to put data they need fast access to in RAM. For example, a site with more money might use redis to cache all the pics for each user (sorted, unique lists), plus all the tweets that point to a pic, but there is too much for me to do that in RAM without selling organs. Also, redis is not very memory efficient. But the advantage is that technologies like that are easy to use and easy to scale. If you have money. The Twitter rule changes freak me out every day but I have not seen any specific moves that make me think they are after me. It is probably a matter of time, but then you need to think about what form that will take. Will they just cut off the Streaming API? That would be a big move. Will they remove pics from the streaming API? I doubt it. Will they make moves to single me out? That would be weird. Will they come after me with lawyers for caching tweets? I don't see that either. But, while I don't see anything specific, there are a lot of what ifs. My advice is to use Twitter to get off the ground and then move away from Twitter altogether if at all humanly possible. That's the strategy they are forcing with their stupid rules, so maybe they will see the light at some point and rethink their strategy.
centdev 14y ago
Thats the tricky part. On the twitter photosharing site (separate project) that I built and maintain, its a constant battle to flag content so that it stays family friendly for advertisers. For flagged media, I show house ads.
velodrome 14y ago
I had similar issues with my service. It's hard to keep the service up with no money. Some suggestions: 1) Improving the quality of the site 2) Remove the adult content to attract better ad providers. 3) Look at adding a paid service (for power users) to hedge ad revenue. Be careful not to alienate current users. 4) Focus on a few key things and do them very well.