121–130 of 165 posts
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.
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That's incredible, congratulations! Care to share what you're working on? Or at least what process led you to the new project?
http://distillerylab.com Sounds boring to most probably, but I love to play with data! And we have real clients!
Where 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 answe…
For those interested (notlisted appears to be!) here are some actual numbers from Google Analytics for October: Unique Visitors 6,461,357 Visits 7,592,870 Pageviews 28,461,178 Avg. Visit Duration 00:02:07 Geos USA: 1.6m visits Indonesia: 687k Japan: 569k not set: 513k UK: 369k Mexico: 261k Turkey: 247k France: 232k Germany: 213k Spain: 185k And an amazingly long tail from there. So that is definitely part of the prob…
You may want to rethink the ads on the home page. Text link below the banner center, remove the image boxes. You should be getting at least $3-4 per 1k imps. Maybe dropping the 'no ads when sign in'. Show ads to everybody, but very few ads. 1 per page, maybe 2, but that's it.
Do you have some analytics to see what they are doing on the site? I mean is 60% of it searching for popstar images and then browsing from then?
Once you know this you can start to steer this firehose into a funnel.
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For those interested (notlisted appears to be!) here are some actual numbers from Google Analytics for October: Unique Visitors 6,461,357 Visits 7,592,870 Pageviews 28,461,178 Avg. Visit Duration 00:02:07 Geos USA: 1.6m visits Indonesia: 687k Japan: 569k not set: 513k UK: 369k Mexico: 261k Turkey: 247k France: 232k Germany: 213k Spain: 185k And an amazingly long tail from there. So that is definitely part of the prob…
I just looked how much we made in Google Adsense in Oct based on the number of unique visitors we received. I calculate that we would have made roughly $42K in Oct based on your unique visitors value. This sounds nonintuitive, but its my opinion that you actually have too many ads on your site to make any money from them. My site is fotoblur.com. You can reach me through the support page if you'd like to chat. I'd lo…
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I really enjoyed your blog post on Hacker News today about the trouble of running Twicsy.
Here's just a few spelling/grammar corrections:
https://draftin.com/documents/168810/changes_to_savepoint?sh...
I definitely understand what you are going through. I had a successful attempt at starting a business with Inkling (http://inklingmarkets.com, which still runs profitably today), but then wanted to try again. So we started a branded games company where companies could stick there own brand images into a bunch of games we made. For example, our version of Bejeweled but with pictures of the latest sweaters at the Gap. And we did some revenue making deals. But the deals were tough to get, and the investors didn't care.
I didn't have the passion for this project like I did with Inkling to see it through. So I gave up relatively quickly. Took a break and worked on the Obama campaign. But then I started Draft (http://draftin.com) about half a year ago, and that's been a considerably different project in terms of success. It's surprised me how much people enjoy it.
One thing that's really helped me is Kathy Sierra's advice (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0...): to find something where I'm making people better at something. And let that guide all my decision making.
For example, If I were trying to sell cameras, I'd wake up and just focus on helping people become better photographers. With Draft I focus on helping people "write better", and every feature or decision I make for the product has to have that as its mission. And it continues to serve me well.
As I briefly look at Twicsy, I can't help feel there is something here about helping people get better at something. Maybe it too is about getting better at taking photos. You must have a lot of data (i.e OkCupid) about what types of photos get traffic. Maybe with that data, you could make companies better at sharing images of what they do to get more fans. You obviously have skill getting SEO traffic, and managing a large image site. Maybe there is a kernel there that you'd be excited to productize.
Anyways, I know the feelings you are going through. I'm not going to say just keep going, because obviously you have. But I am confident, that eventually there is something you are exploring here that could be turned into something that can sustain itself.
I'm here to brainstorm or chat if you need me. Happy to be of any kind of help. Please feel free to ask. No need to feel like you are toiling at this alone.
-Nate
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For those interested (notlisted appears to be!) here are some actual numbers from Google Analytics for October: Unique Visitors 6,461,357 Visits 7,592,870 Pageviews 28,461,178 Avg. Visit Duration 00:02:07 Geos USA: 1.6m visits Indonesia: 687k Japan: 569k not set: 513k UK: 369k Mexico: 261k Turkey: 247k France: 232k Germany: 213k Spain: 185k And an amazingly long tail from there. So that is definitely part of the prob…
Forget Twitter Bootstrap, if people cared what a site looks like - explain Craigslist.. You may want to rethink the ads on the home page. Text link below the banner center, remove the image boxes. You should be getting at least $3-4 per 1k imps. Maybe dropping the 'no ads when sign in'. Show ads to everybody, but very few ads. 1 per page, maybe 2, but that's it.
I agree with moving the ads though. Users who've shown enough interest to click into a page might be more amenable to target advertising.
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There is an email at the bottom of every page on Twicsy. Unfortunately you need to jump through a hoop after that because I am trying to avoid spam, but there you go!
This comment thread in particular may provide more information about your challenge in finding monetary success than your entire wonderfully written blog post. Here, in quick succession you first suggest that you have very little ability to change the UI because you are a bad developer, then quickly follow that up with a confession to somebody who wants to give you money, that you've made it annoying to contact you b…
B. Getting somebody decent to help for equity is hard. I have been at this for many years, of course I have tried that. Spend a few bucks and get it done isn't helpful because I am broke.
C. I think I work pretty hard!
D. My email is in my HN profile. Many others have contacted me already.
E. You assume too much!
[I edited out my negative tone. I was originally annoyed by your comment, but as you said, you are trying to help! Thanks for your feedback.]
Finally, a website that lets me search twitters massive database of stupid pictures people take of themselves. How are you not a billionaire?
A quick search for "thinspo" shows Twitter has a lot of work left to do if they want to stop people using twitter for pro-anorexia messaging.