someone's bad at being greedy
My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
41–50 of 165 posts
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#42A few comments from an initial glance: - Site could be improved a lot for mobile. If you get a lot of mobile traffic, which wouldn't surprise me, I'll bet it massively underperforms desktop traffic on site engagement and ad revenue. - You need to A/B test your ad locations a lot more. The locations do not look particularly good to me, but then again this does depend a lot on how most people interact with your site (w…
Agreed with mobile optimization, I have over 35% mobile traffic and I am doing a terrible job of taking advantage of this. But I don't know the first thing about how to do this. I have done some research and experiments but honestly couldn't make sense of it.
Yes, I am banned from Adsense, and just about every top tier ad network. There is a certain amount of porn on Twicsy (maybe 10% of overall traffic, nothing earth shattering) that makes it unsavory to many advertisers. Despite aggressive filtering in place to stop serving top tier ads on anything that might possibly be objectionable, and removing 10's of millions of pictures, it seems like every top provider has blacklisted Twicsy.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#43Sharing 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…
SEO is the largest feeder of traffic for Twicsy. People get there by searching for a very long tail of things. But there are quite a few that return just to browse around it seems, or check out the top photos. 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…
I'd love to do a free redesign for Twicsy. Email me (inlith@gmail.com) if you're interested.
My portfolio is at madebyargon.com
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#44It's full of (crappy - sorry) ads that probably don't pay much. Perhaps less is more? I'm not really a Google advocate, but how about switching to text-based ads only and focusing more on showing the user real content instead of large, annoying banners?
I have tried at least 50 ad networks and what I am using now seems to work the best. But I am always willing to try something new...
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#45I don't use twitter much. But recently there was a large tanker crash near where I live. The truck had exploded, and there were lots of people killed and hurt. I wanted to see some pictures, but one hour after the incident the story was not (yet) on the TV news. So I turned to twitter, and using the standard twitter search, I found a few ransoms photos of the incident. What I needed was a better way to search twitter…
Time & Geographically based searches would be a moneymaker, no doubt about it. Could be something that Twitter would buy up themselves too
Actually I just found this: http://nearbytweets.com/ - seems someone has already done it (for free). You can change the location to anywhere in the world (not just 'near' you)
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#46Where does the traffic come from? I think I may know.
TRAFFIC
A brief glance at alexa (I know, I know...) shows the source breakdown of his traffic:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twicsy.com USA (17.5%), India (13.4%), Indonesia (11.3%), Japan (4.1%)
More interestingly, it lists some feeder pages, and there's one interesting one:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090722010355AA...
Which contains this answer:
"Bonus - This is an easy way to include pictures you have uploaded to Twitter in an easy and automated fashion. Go to http://twicsy.com and type in your twitter username. You will see all of the pictures you have uploaded through twitter. Now scroll to the right and click on the 'RSS' button. Now you can use this automatically updated link of your tiwtter pictures."
RSS FEEDS
So... since people can use twicsy to find all pictures on a certain hashtag topic ( http://twicsy.com/?search=%23cinderella ) or from a certain user ( http://twicsy.com/u/onedirection ), they can include these in their own sites as RSS feeds, thus contributing to his overall server traffic, but perhaps not actual visitors.
BANDWIDTH
He does not actually seem to host (all/any?) pictures himself (i.e. little bandwidth), but wraps twimg.com files in his own RSS tags, adding links to his site.
TRAFFIC 2
By the way, his assertion of 6MM visits a month is reflected in the quantcast numbers:
https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!traffic
DEMOGRAPHIC
Also, pretty interesting affinity sites and demographic (younger males, no kids, not wealthy, college educated, more than avg african american and hispanic visitors) with a strong affinity for O'Reilly Automotive (perhaps not very similar to the audience of this site, hence virtually unknown)
https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!demo
GEO
Geo findings of Alexa seem to agree with Alexa, though strangely enough, India is missing from the top countries. Quantcast claims only 56k unique cookies from India. Perhaps someone one is using his site and responsible for a lot of the Alexa 13.5% ?
https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!geo
MONEY MONEY MONEY
If my theory of above average RSS traffic is right, only he can tell, think he could make more money if he inserted some adverts into his RSS feed. Not sure how well this would go over with Twitter, since he's not doing (most of?) the image hosting.
I also get the feeling something is amiss. The Alexa and Quantcast numbers are significantly out of whack (13.4% of all traffic from India, yet only 56k unique visitors) strikes me as odd. He may be spending a bunch of money on servers whilst others save money on using them as a tool.
On a personal level I find the design very unattractive and out-of-date, which may prevent the site from becoming much of a destination and could be linked to the 60+% bounce rate. If I were him I would figure out what competitors do ( like twitpic, which according to compete is an actual competitor: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/twicsy.com/ ) and take it from there.
Access to actual analytics could provide more ideas for money-making (or -saving).
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#47A 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.
You may be right about #1, that was to be my next attempt at monetization. Right now you can only do keyword searches on the past month, I was going to offer a service to let people search the full index for maybe $10/month. But I am now involved with another startup that is taking all my time and I am not sure when I will get the chance to try this.
I have talked to many people about #2 but was unable to figure out something compelling to sell.
Tried #3 with Peecho for about a week, not one sale!
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#48I am unconvinced that traffic is all a site needs to be a real business. Sites like pinterest & snapchat convince us otherwise. And those business operate at a loss. Trying doing that as your side project...and you probably wont go very far unless you have VCs with some deep pockets...or publicity from sites like hacker news & tech crunch.
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#49The 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 have very little ability to change the UI because I am a bad web developer and every change I make seems to make things worse. But thanks for the placement suggestion, maybe that is worth a try. 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 :)
@dumbfounder how can i get in touch regarding buying space on your site?
Re: My really successful, unfundable, piece of shit startup I hate to love
#50You should be making a lot more than you're making. With a few tweaks to your ad placement you should be making more than enough to live off of.
I only say this because your current ad placement is kind of annoying and intrusive (especially on the content detail pages), yet they seem to be placed in some of the worst places to actually generate clicks. Of course, I don't have specific data or testing from your site to back that theory up, but if your site follows the trends I've seen in other sites this is certainly the case.
Feel free to reach out to me at the email address in my HN profile and I'll help you get them placed right/help you test out placement to start generating some real revenue. 6 million uniques is nothing to turn your nose up at, and it should be enough for you to make a living off of quite easily.