31–40 of 165 posts
I don't understand if it has 6 million unique visitors a month, how can he not monetize this? This seems to be more about how the revenue via advertising has dried up. Can barely pay for the servers !?
I put Admob ads and suddenly revenue started zooming. My app will not scale beyond a point. It is unfundable. It is really crappy technology (basically a static website put as a webview) but it gets hundreds of installs every day and touching "thank you emails" every day.
A few random ideas in no particular order 1) Paywall. Even if 1 out of 10,000 people agrees to pay, you will have 600 paying customers per month. 2) Sell analytics / data on what's trending. 3) Offer to make prints of the images. 4) Branching out #3 - not just prints, but fridge magnets, tiles, mugs, whatever.
If you want some cricisim, the website style might be turning people away. http://twicsy.com/ The colours, contrast, and various sizes/spacing of things are somewhat unsettling.
Sharing some of the analytics behind how you think people use the site would probably make for a much more interesting discussion around monetization. EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing. And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc? Those are dramatically different user…
Agreed, the UX/UI is terrible. One big problem is that I am a terrible web developer, I am really just a back end data guy that knows enough to be dangerous on the front end.
But that's part of the reason why I think it has much more potential. The site gets a ton of traffic despite its obvious flaws. If I had the funds to do a redesign and even execute well on the basics who knows what could happen?
I get that people are trying to be helpful, and think that's great. But this blog post was awesome, raw, and captured something that so few of us can really relate to. Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding. "Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you." Shine on, buddy. Best of luck!
The ad placement is basically terrible. You should place fewer ads, but put them nearer the content and above the fold. For example, get them out of the sidebar and make one banner in line with the content between the navigation and the pictures. Basically get rid of the rest. Also, have you considered selling ads on BuySellAds.com? With that amount of traffic you should make decent money on a CPM or monthly basis.
I contacted BuySellAds a while back and they passed on the opportunity. They said their target audience doesn't line up well with Twicsy. Or some crap like that :)
Make a Twicsy app, price it at a dollar, push it through the site and you're set.