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Advice for Websites Combating Net.Obscurity?
waveclaw asks: "A Catch-22: how to initially draw people to a community when the a community itself is the selling point and your being drowned in information sea that the web has become? Many people take the popularity of Slashdot and other 'people concentrators' for granted. Whole communities are developing, as they have done for thousands of years, on web logs and news sites via reader feedback. Unfortunately, not all sites are well traveled. (Side note: a lot of reseach has apperantly gone into this.) For instance, the special interst publication Dragon Spirit Magazine is closing their doors due to a lack rather than surfiet of viewers. Belfy Comics lists an entire section of online-only comics which are (for lack of a better term) abandoned by both viewer and creator.
Porbably the most powerful force obliterating free communication is neither fundamentalist nor jack-booted: it's obscurity."
"While network outages are easy to diagnose by comparison, what does a site do when it's dying? Sites like Keenspace and Webring and wiki try to build self-referential collections of sites and pages that sometimes work and sometimes don't Has anyone out had their back to this wall a lot and come out winning? Short of a listing on Slashdot, how?"
the better memes (more interesting sites) survive, while the dull ones without any care from the maintainers fall to the side. This isnt the rule, just a general case.
also, can one of you admins restart the daemon that updates the front page stories' number of posts?
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
If people don't like it, change it. Lack of interest is the public telling you something. People go to sites like Sluggy Freelance, Slashdot, etc. because the site offers something they enjoy and tell theri friends about. One email blitz of friends telling friends can make a huge difference. People just have to like the contents.
The Gardener
--
sites and communities fall into obscurity for one of two reasons:
a: They're way to limited in their scope, thereby alienating a large potential audience; or
b: They lack any interesting or original content, and thus don't attract any new members/users.
A lot of webmins are quick to blame the audience for their lack of ingenuity or creativity. Remember - if it's not very interesting, who is going to be interested? Furthermore, if it's not very original, then most people will gather around something that is.
I think the poster is thinking about this the wrong way. When it comes down to it, if no one visits your website, it means that nearly no one WANTS to visit your website. This either means it sucks, is on some topic nobody cares about, or is a mixture of the two.
Even if it's on an obscure topic, it eventually will pick up search engine hits etc... I have friends who ran sound mixing websites and even an RV parts store. They do nothing for advertising and started having all kinds of hits in the first case and orders in the second (very different types of websites).
Anyway, if your site is dying, it's because of a more fundamental problem.
I have worked on many projects which have failed due to a shortfall in uptake. The sites themselves were excellent, and beloved by their userbase - but the userbase just wasn't big enough.
/. style, live CHAT style, or some hideous mix as we did recently these are the key to any site working. Even one that is not there specifically to allow interchange - enable it and you give the site a sense of place - of commonality - of community. It's fluffy - but it works!
Running the risk of a granny egg sucking session, here are some observations of things which HELP a site.
Novel Material / Early News
If your site can be first with the news, or provide good novel content which is interesting / useful enough for people to print / bookmark you have a good chance of being referenced. This is a key FREE way to spread the word.
Forums
Wether
Hard Copies
It sounds stupid - but the sites we built early on, which had a paper newsletter (usually quarterly) asociated with them have done well. People seem to repond to the paper mail and visit the site. Coincide the paper issue with a new feature / big story and you multiply the effect.
Email
Give people a reminder email every couple of weeks - its not spam - they signed up for it. Say something in the email - not just 'visit us'.
Recommend a Friend
Give people an easy way to forward links to the site, and to every individual item within the site straight from the page. We know they can do this easily without a 'recommend a friend' button - but they really do work. Up to 50% of new members are coming from this on some sites.
Stats
Show people how many people are using the site - make people visible, through forums or other mechanisms. If you see a site thats obviously been updated TODAY and has a bunch of visitors your more likely to take it seriously.
And some stuff you would THINK would work but in my experience doesn't.
Directories
Niche directories sound great. Operate a definitive list of great sources of information for people to access. Hope they start using you as their own bookmarks for this topic.
On the whole our feedback shows most people are happy with google, AV, etc... for 90% of links, so don't need this kind of thing. These are costly to maintain well, and of little benefit.
Too many options
A mature site can cope with tonnes of options to switch this off, that on, remove images, add a reminder service etc... But again, we find that this stuff just puts people off if its there before an established community.
Client confidentiality, DPA, etc.. stops me citing the examples - sorry.
I run hackerheaven.org and I am also suffering from lack of content. As things move slow, the site isn't updated for a long time. This will ultimately kill it of course. I also know that things like these start slow. I guess I'll have to tough it out. In the end it comes down to how much patience you got...
Ever heard of "porn"?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Why don't people visit my website?
Why don't people want to help code my open source project?
Why don't people want to help test my program?
Why don't people go all ga ga over what I'm excited about?
Why doesn't want to go on a date with me?
Sometimes people have really great ideas that get put out on the Web and like minded individuals flock to them. Other times you end up with utter crap.
If you try to start a community like a business it's going to suck. Nobody wants to join a site just so the site owner can retire to six mansions. Do something you're interested in and make an effort to do it well and then just build in ways the community can add on to what your already doing.
Advertise. It sucks but yes if you want to get your site going quickly the best way to do so is to find newspapers, magazines, etc about the same topic and advertise your site. If people don't know about your site nobody will come to it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Porbably the most powerful force obliterating free communication is neither fundamentalist nor jack-booted: it's obscurity
huh? Porbably???
Most 'community' sites are basically all clones of each other. Pick your favorite subject. There is always a forum, weblog, obligatory Yahho Group. Now multiply that by 50.
...
Nowhere is this more rampant than the linux community.
How many linux news sites running slash/scoop/nuke are linking to all the same stories? Can you even tell them apart?
It doesn't matter where a surfer goes, eventually it all goes to the same syndicated Reuters stuff, ZD FUD, or goatsex.
Everything's been done, we're in a rut
That's how Rusty got noticed.
Best Slashdot Co
The sites you put up as examples are sites where the user interest is nonexistant. I don't care about a "cute lil' cat" or "cute lil'" anythings, for that matter. I don't think I'm alone among netizens for that. And I don't think that "Magick" has a huge following either.
However, if you want a media system and a belief system that are popular, Star Wars and Christianity are both doing fine.
And sites become popular overnight! Need I remind you of the dancing hamsters and "All your base" phenomena that took the nation by storm inexplicably with only wierdness to pull them along?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I have an idea - they should send people email promising them free pr0n with a link to the site contained within. I don't see how this could fail - we'll code name it "Armour".
You mention archives that are largely unvisited.
I've been to many large municipal libraries which have special archives of books and documents...many of which have not been accessed in decades (example : one book I read had not been opened for 23 years).
I suspect the web needs this type of persistence for at least some of it's content. National archives, maybe? It's hard to tell what will be interesting to the "web researchers" of 1,000 years from now.
Maybe it will all fit on a jaz by then!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
...or a stunt.
Even SlashDot itself didn't take off till a CNN story talked about it.
Next, you have to hook people into coming back. Analyzing my own habits there are two primary reasons for revisiting. Interresting content and frequently updated content. Slashdot, DrugeReport, DarkHorizons, DailyGrail, TheRegister.Co.UK, Salon, Slate... Keep it fresh and interresting or I'll soon forget to come back. I live on the net at work and home, so weekly updates are too slow.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Or you could just cover something that no one else does. Like goats.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If it's traffic that you want, try submitting a fairly inane "ask slashdot" question, and make sure to include plenty of links to the sites that you're trying to promote. For good measure, try throwing in a link to a Wired article.
What's this? It seems you've beaten me to the punch.
Seriously, though...can anyone else see that this is a fairly desperate attempt at driving traffic to two VERY obscure websites?
I can only speak to my own sites, particularly Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, which is dedicated to contemporary nonpop (read "classical new music and electronia").
We started in September 1995 (using RealAudio 1.0, if anyone's old enough to remember that), have won awards (real ones, with money, such as the Deems Taylor Award for Internet journalism presented by ASCAP (yes, I know /. loves to hate ASCAP) at Lincoln Center), and have had nearly 330,000 visitors and 130,000,000 hits since we started counting in 1997.
Those aren't big numbers, and they're also not big money. When you have a kind of 'mission' -- i.e., bringing nonpop to a wider audience -- it takes a lot of time. A lot of time. And folks always want something new, which means even more time. (Even the process of editing, converting and uploading our two-hour radio shows -- real radio, not Internet bitcasts -- for posting takes big chunks of time.)
Like any content-rich site, it's also expensive -- bandwidth, storage (our site is nearly 6GB), software purchases, licenses, travel for interviews, etc. -- even if we (there are two of us) don't get paid. In fact, 80% of the site's cost is paid by us, and fundraising icons and even fundraising sales are ignored. We've had to answer inquiries from licensing agencies, negotiate agreements with composers (are remember we started three years before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and had lots of stuff to 'grandfather'. When the New York Times print and online editions featured us at the end of October, we were hit will 11GB of bandwidth overcharges.
We've eschewed the banner ad, kept the site focused on content and not design, and maintained near-complete Section 508 accessibility. As web expectations have grown, so have we, even though we're not a design-happy site.
It's a lot of work, and we're halfway through our seventh year of doing it. People, I think, just tire of 'labors of love' after a while. We're a first-hand case of a site that has received accolades from visitors and media, and as two aging professional composers (both in our fifties) who also have day jobs, it's a pretty exhausting task. To have to pay $5,000+ a year for the privilege of doing it is even more tiring.
Will we go away? Of course we will, either when we've completed our mission (unlikely) or when we're just unable to face another day of watching hundreds of visitors suck down the contents of our site without so much as a dollar sent in via Paypal.
Dennis
http://kalvos.org/
If you have a cool site that will draw people back, you don't need to tell too many people about it. Word of mouth goes a long way on the Internet. Of course, you do have to tell the right people. NPR's been going on about social network analysis recently. If you can find the right people in the social networks, you can score big in the first time eyeballs arena by telling them about your site. Though that won't help you if your site sucks or has a flash in the pan kinda cool thing going for it. A lot of sites on the net are cool the first time but since they never change, they rapidly get old. Unless you want to be constantly maintaining your site and adding new content to it, you need to draw your users in and make them part of the site (Slashdot offers a little of both, which I think contributes to its continued success.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
And to think that I only joined slashdot in 1999! :)
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Marketing. Read some books on it.
Of course, it's good to have something special, something that people actually want (marketing types call this "differentiation").
I use a telnet based BBS (located in the UK) - called Monochrome. It's 10 years old now, and still going strong, although the population seems to remain roughly constant (but aging). It used to primarily made up of a user-base of students, but it has now evolved into a BBS for young adults, and hopefully it'll continue to evolve as time goes on.
I don't know how the admin would choose to try and boost the population however if it started stuttering into serious decline - there seems to be a resistance these days to anything without a web interface or a custom client. Trying to explain telnet to someone who has never used it before can be quite difficult - especially when they try and click on the screen to activate options. The BBS has a java client on the website, but I don't think this really offers the best solution.
The main attraction for people though is the community itself - there are files on virtually every topic anyone would want to discuss, but the files are nothing without the community. People KNOW each other there - in a current vote at least a third of the users claim to know (in real life) 20 or more other users. This is a real life community, not just a virtual one - and a perfect example of how the virtual world need not be entirely divorced from the real world.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
communities have been developing around web logs for thousands of years? wow. huh. i wonder if Moses had to worry about first post noise or trolls.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
...is when a site becomes popular, and the resulting bandwidth usage leads to excessive bandwidth charges.
This very problem - a problem surely manufactured by the bandwidth providers - has forced even Salon.com, and Slashdot, to consider or implement subscription systems.
This will effectively cut them off from a large portion of their intended audience because
1) Some people can't afford to subscribe;
2) Some people already subscribe to 50 places, and are NOT gonna add another load onto their finances.
This is how you destroy even the most popular ideas and sites, very quick. Bury 'em in high bandwidth costs, and scare off 90% of their audience by forcing them to go to paid subscriptions; or worse, cause them to stop operations altogether.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I checked out the Dragon Spirit site just to see what it was. The main page told me nothing of what the intended audience was. I had to go to the about link to see who they were targeting (and determine that it was of no interest to me).
/.: Right there on the main page is "Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Right off, I can get a pretty good idea of whom /. is targeting, and make a decision as to whether I stick around or leave.
Compare and contrast that to
On the web, you have about 10 seconds to grab my attention - then I'm outta here. Too many web sites overlook this rule - 50 second downloads of flash, useless intro pages, a failure to state what their target interest is, excluding anybody who isn't running $browser at $x_resolution by $y_resolution with @plugins.
It's just like real life (in fact, most things online are "just like real life") - if you want to build a group, you cannot needlessly exclude anybody. I belong to two amateur radio clubs - one welcomes anybody to its meetings, licensed or not. The other has two old farts who dump on anybody who didn't work with Marconi (not the company, the man!) and are abusive to everybody else. Guess which club is healthy, and which is dying!
Be easy to join, be clear who you are targeting, stomp on the trolls who drive off new members, don't be too overly narrow in your focus, and you might be able to create a group.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Persistance. If you try your best, and keep going at it, eventually you will be rewarded. The thing is that you can't stop improving - always get better, and eventually you'll have enough good content, enough recurring visitors that you'll have something to be proud of. Far too many sites become stagnant that could have become something great - you don't have to do the same. Dave
------
http://cooltech.org
If it ain't cool, it ain't coolt
Simple. You don't. The site admins can't create a community by themselves. They sell their sites with content and interface.
If you can afford it you can short-cut that process - you can buy some good content or convince friends, family, and strangers to provide it. And if the long-term approach to building up a profile is too slow, you could alwas buy come advertising (all I've ever spent was $20 as an experiment). Just make sure you put the content up before you do the advertising!
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I run a skiing portal/weblog community type site... I haven't had any problem getting members. I attribute this mostly to how I've built the site.
1. I don't have any expenses, so I don't care whether I get readers or not. Not a primary concern.
2. I concentrate on making my site interesting and easy to use. This should be your 1st goal, because most weblog/portals suck. IF a potential new user navigates to your site, and there is nothing there that interests him/her, that user won't ever come back.
Slashdot is targeted at the right kind of people for this type of media... geeks. The target demographic has a lot to do what people expect to get from your site. The vast majority of internet users don't understand what a weblog is. From that aspect, you need to provide content in a manner that normal users would understand. For example, my skiing portal is layed out like a magazine, with complete articles, and other diversions.
Have interesting subject matter. Understand your target reader.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Maybe the reason there are so few "good" movies and so few "good" books and so few "good" TV shows is that, at the end of the day, we can't handle too many good things at once?
10 years ago as an undergrad I began watching the web phenomenon unfold and rejoiced as sites like Alta VIsta, Yahoo, Slashdot, mags like Wired etc., online news services began to grow and churn out content... then (for me) came quake, irc, streaming audio, streaming video(!!), mp3s, the list goes on..
.. then something strange happened. I stopped looking. Occasionally I'll do a search on something specific... even more occasionally I'll just browse. But by and large... I go to slashdot once a day now.. check my local news service once or twice a day and thats about it.
Once you get into a routine you become passive... and even though 1000 new wonderful things are out there... you lose the motivation to go and find them.
'sapientia potestas est'
the better memes (more interesting sites) survive
But what happened with a good meme that is never read by a "good" reader?
Cocacola.com has his audience despite the fact that has no content because they have money.
Each content need his audience, but not always audicen and content meet.
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
Its a shame that some sites slip away without the people of the net spotting its special points.
Fine some people say its evolution of the internet, and i sorta belive in this. Without the newer better looking websites people wouldn't strive to improve there site and make a more interesting, content driven, and community centered site. If this never happend we would be still stuck in the dark ages of websites, with simple black and red text themes.
While sites slip away without a blink of an eye, people must strive for the traffic now...no longer can we get away with dull repetive sites that cover the ground again.
Anyway thats my 2 cents..."What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
By the way, if you want to combat this, you might like to visit my website-in-development at www.doublezero.uklinux.net. I am developing the code a bit like Slash, PHP-Nuke etc. but it has far to go before it even becomes capable of holding a community, let alone attracting one :->
http://www.doublezero.uklinux.net/
Doublezero: like Slashdot, only less useful.
With apologies to Sluggy Freelance
/. gave, well...I random sampled and was not impressed.
Sluggy, like most web comics, if you jump into it at a late date, makes no sense...you have to go to the beginning.
Even then, well, it grows on you. And who does not like "Bun-bun"...a switchblade toting mini-lop...heh.
Link whoring biatch that I can be: PVP, GPF, Sherman's Lagoon a long time favorite of mine, Dilbert of course, and one that was pointed out to me recently: Non-Sequitur and, of course, Userfriendly.
What is the common thread amongst all those sites I'd recommend? Intelligence, humor, referrences to other events (this usually escapes some of the younger crowd/moderators/slashdroids, no offense) and some funny characters, situations and all.
If you look at the comics on the links
That's my opinion,
Cheers,
Moose.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
The community hosting my web site is currently in the throes of going under, but it's hard to imagine that it's from a lack of traffic. In the year and a half I've been with them, banner ad rates dropped three times, they tried pop-ups, and I started shopping for a new host when the pop-unders appeared. *My* site's traffic is going as strong as ever, however, primarily due to getting listed in Yahoo's direcory. On average, Yahoo sends about 150 new visitors a day. I think a proper listing in Yahoo, Open Directory, and Google have kept me going strong.
The web was meant to share information. Really! No Really! That's why it was initally created.... Not to sell stuff. No Really....
Idealy, portals are just that, a way to share mass amounts of information and allow users to find their way there. Also communities are a way to share information of a like idea, sport, subject matter, whatever....
It's when you throw in a large commercial aspect of pop-up ads, click here for this, or buy that from me, that people / surfers loose interest in your site. They are there to share ideas and information, not buy something. If they want to buy something, then they'll go to the appropriate store or online store, not a community that sells it. Just go direct to the horses mouth.
A web community that I'm still apart of went through this failed transition. He wanted to make money off of his extrememly popular and traveled web community. He added lots of ads. And took it from a small, focused community, and made it into a large portal. This failed because the focused community only cared about one thing, not the rest. He dropped back to where he started. He then charged a small fee and made a membership section. I paid for a membership. Very few did.
Everyone else jumped ship and went to another FREE community. Communities are easy to build and find. If it's good, and the information is there, people will come. If you force advertisements and memberships or sales down the throats of users, they will leave. Information was meant to be free. Keep it so, and people will come.
My advice:
Don't do it for the money, do it because you love it. Do it because you have something to share. Do it because you want to talk about what you enjoy with others that enjoy the same thing. Don't do it to make a quick buck... It will never work.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
LIMITED SCOPE: I started a site called FRUITILITY that is devoted to discussing how software development can be both futile and fruitless.
LACK OF CONTENT: I tried to get some heavy hitters to post original content (e.g. Kent Beck, Ron Jefferies, and the rest of the Agile Alliance gang). Many of them stopped by and some of them even left a little content. However, the other hundred or so visitors did not feel compelled to comment or leave their own content.
Many people have liked the idea, but even those who initially loved it have not yet left any content. It makes me wonder what percentage of a sites members go there to post versus go there to read.
Steve
FRUITILITY
The fruitiless futility of software development.
Polls with CowboyNeal as an option.
It helps to be able to spell and use English grammar correctly -- in this sense, Slashdot is an exception. There were about 10-15 spelling/usage errors in your question, which lends an air of ignorance and stupidity to your online effort. At any rate, good luck for the future!
please give links to sites containig them. This is imortant to balance the newsflow.
Different sites will always have different numbers of visitors. It's obvious - a site about Star Wars will always have more visitors than an equivalent site about say, fly fishing (for want of a better example), simply because Star Wars is more well known. But that doesn't mean that the fly fishing site is obscure - it might be the most popular fly fishing site on the web.
The real question is how much of your potential audience are you attracting? Do fly fishermen know about your site. If your target audience is interested and visiting the site then you're doing fine. If not, that's when you need to worry.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
The site is so unpopular it's not even /.ed right now!
graspee
I just love how so many (but definitely not all) slashdotters thump their chest and bellow about how the free market should rule everything, and then refuse to put their money or time where their mouths are, or even recognize how their precious free markets really work.
Web sites are like products in that they're competing for the attention of customers. Those that give visitors a good deal for their investment in time and/or money will thrive, those that don't will shrivel and die. It really is that simple.
That's what I see, anyway. I've been a part of multiple small communities that've turned into something big. The Planetquake community that became Gamespy Industries, the Contaminated.net community that was devoured by GSI and became planethalflife.com, the group of Lowtax fans that became SomethingAwful.com readers, and the Politechbot.com members that became readers of what has to be one of the most popular mailing lists around.
Your readers may say they love what you do, but if they loved it enough word of mouth and power of linkage would keep your hitcount rising. This is where I come to the 'problematic solution' part: when it's decided that content-creators somehow are entitled to success in return for their having worked hard to create something not many people want, we'll get our savior; it'll be 'Philip Mepocketz', saint of consumerism. A website's existence will become even more dependent on advertisers, and achievement through one's own talent will become obsolete in the face of large marketing firms that can be hired to make "Bill Gates' personal journal" page the most popular site online -- much like how, today, a large record company can give a pile of shit a pretty face and make it the most popular band in America (among young people who've been raised in a world that holds physical perfection as it's #1 priority). And the day that happens, is the day I sell my computer.
(Side note: a lot of research has apperantly gone into this.)
which is
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/bronson_pr .html
well, this is dated January 6, 1998.
Is it just me, or is this info simply dated, coming as it does from the middle of the dot-bomb boom, three years before the edge of the cliff was even visible?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Didn't you or at least one of your friends go through that 'Nobody likes me, how come I'm not popular' phase? Well, in case you didn't, here is the lesson to learn:
You don't become popular by whining that you are not popular.
This thread reminds me of all the stupid web site surveys I've put up for clients. They ask dumb questions like 'Do you think this site is cool?', 'Would you recommend it to a friend?', 'Do you plan on coming back to this site, if so how often?'.
Nothing says 'I AM A LAMO' like these types of questions.
I agree that building a community is hard. But like others have said so far, it is a social/marketing problem, not a technical one. I think communities are made by leaders, not by good ideas.
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
PS: wtf is this doing in the "censorship" category? Someone's failure to be an effective marketer/hype generator is not censorship.
2) The support mechanism for the site (products advertised, etc) have to be valuable enough that people will go for these as well.
Maintaining the character of a site, breathing life into it so that it is constantly alive, is WORK. Some folks burn out on this faster than others.
An example of this are sites like ubersoft, a comic strip which is decent, often excellent, but where the author sometime falls behind due to distractions or other details, or the well runs dry for a day or two.
In a website like slash, the number of stories submitted, comments posted daily typically is something like one percent of the active users that day. It also depends on the events of the day, etc. A very crude measure to be sure. of course, you can have someone just pumping out stories for a year or two, But you better have an edge, like spinsanity does, being located in DC, etc.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
i run dangerz.net, and i have a nice fanbase. one thing that kills a site is downtime tho. i was averaging ~500 a day back in the day, and was gradually rising. then my server went down for a month, that went down to like 20 a day. i was able to pull it back up to 300, till my host went down again for a month. now i'm at 70, and gradually coming back. having people with sites like yours, that are more popular, link you is a big help also. dangerz.net is a fun hobby for me. have fun with your site, and don't worry about the hits. by the time you remember to check your hits, you'll realize you're getting a lot more than you thought. and remember, it's all about the fans. and a little about you.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
This may be the number one problem facing the Net. If I start a restaurant in Denver, I don't have to compete with those in San Francisco or New York. On the web, everything is one click away. If a site isn't the best in its niche (or one of the top few depending on the size of the niche), it faces obscurity.
The ease of publishing on the web is really deceptive. The marketing of web content is really no easier, possibly harder than for print media. We don't have the equivalent of the magazine rack in the grocery store or news stand.
I've been trying to promote my own community web site for about 8 months now. (For those who are interested, the link is in my sig.) I have some practical observations for promotion based on a _very_ small budget: First: your two best hopes are word of mouth and being mentioned by a place that gets _lots_ of traffic. Second: don't bother spending money on something like Google unless you can find a really good demographic to target. I tried this for quite some time and I think I maybe got 3 or 4 people joining for my efforts and dollars (about $300) - definitely not worth it! Third: take advantage of sites like slashdot where you can use your sig, and from time to time post comments which actually are on-topic and attract people. I've done this relatively successfully and been modded up for my efforts because I was careful to post appropriately. Fourth: find portal sites that are apropos to your community site that allow you to submit links. Submit your site. For the amount of effort, this really helps with search engine rankings and a little bit of traffic. Fifth: email people who's personal sites indicate they might be interested in your site. This is unsolicited, but most people appreciate feedback on their own efforts and also are interested in opportunities to promote themselves. Community sites often offer this opportunity one way or another. Six: well, my site isn't "successful" yet, but it's growing slowly but surely. To be frank, I don't really want a _huge_ surge in attention because I'm not sure yet about the scalability of my servers. Be careful what you ask for: I personally believe that slow but sure growth will be worth more in the long run. (And that isn't just sour grapes: I've learned a lot by having people provide feedback. If I had a huge surge, I probably would have ended up with a lot of dissappointed users.)
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Post to a bunch of ultra-conservative weblogs stating so-and-so weblog is full of self-deluding liberals slandering the American way of life, and then sit back and enjoy the massive influx of posters. This, of course, at the cost of turning your weblog into an ultra-conservative me-too lovefest.
Oh really? How interesting!
Much of this has already been stated here, but here goes.
1. Keep it free.
The mantra here on slashdot is often information wants to be free. This isn't exactly true, and is rather antromorphic. A better statment is that information tends to move toward a state of being free. In other words, no matter what you do, you will be unable to make much money charging for 'premium' content. The only exceptions being large providers like AOL, and those who suffer from too many visitiors, not too few. If you are trying to get more visitior, charging for access will simply cause them to go elsewhere.
2. Keep advertisment to a minimum.
Keep the annoying ads to an absolute minimum. You need to pay for your site, but annoying me with popups, popunders, or banner ads will generally just piss me off. Honestly I can't recall even one ad (internet or otherwise) that convinced me to buy anything. On the other hand, there have been many times that I have stopped patronizing a business because of the ads.
3. Keep it open to everyone.
You should welcome anyone to discuss whatever topic you want. Don't allow flamers hotheads or assholes to dominate any discussions you have.
4. Keep a specific focus.
Although it should be open to everyone, keep it specific. Slasdot is 'news for nerds' instance. we discuss geeky things here. More mainstream things are generally shunned here. Keep true to the general purpose of the site.
5. Make it obvious what the site is about. I don't want to have to spend 20 minutes trying to figure what your site is talking about. I should know within 10-15 seconds of clicking the link.
6. Keep the site easy to access. Make it quick loading, with a minimum of extra crap. Stay away from flash, java, javascript, large images and anything else that increases the download/rendering time. Remember a large percentage of your users will likely be comming across a dialup connection. Make it friendly to low bandwith connections. Only use the major stuff when absolutely necessary. Javascript further should be avoided because of it's tendency to crash a browser. I have even turned good javascript into bad by pressing stop at an inopportune time. Wherever possible use server side processing. Client side processing could be used to take some of the burden off of your server, but even then it should be possible to make such things optional rather than manditory.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
Hello,
I tried a few things for my planenews.com aviation site... First, the site wasn't put up for profit but started out as the Aircraft Builders Mailing List, which gave me a base of members to announce the site to. Syndication also brings me some traffic. I syndicate the news themselves, and also wrote a script that grabs the NTSB reports and turns them into an XML file. Sporadic announcements on newsgroups helps too, but I don't want to spam so these are very limited. The hardest thing to do is entice visitors to post their own news. I still have to post news myself to keep the site alive... If anyone cares to look at it, I am looking for constructive criticism...
Gil.
PGP public key at: http://keskydee.com/gil.asc
Produce some content that people actually _want_ to read/watch/listen to. It's easy to blame someone else for one's problems and shortcomings.
So remember, 90% of everything is shit. 99.999% of everything on the web is shit. Beat the odds and people will flock to your site.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
Probably the most powerful force obliterating free communication is neither fundamentalism nor jack-booting: it's obscurity."
Cliff, Katz steal your password again?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
On Quorum.org [quorum.org] we were having this discussion [quorum.org] just yesterday. Part of the discussion talked about how to get casual viewers involved and participating in a community site. There were some other things discussed, go and take a look.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
It's probably going under because the front page contains a 254k flash animation which is apparently necessary to view the site. Even on my work T1 it's going to take about a minute to load.
If I'd let it. I closed the window but fast, so it wouldn't do something crazy but typical, like crash my browser.
I'd only heard about the site once before, roughly a month ago, so I'd say they haven't given themselves enough time to build a community. But they don't even have a fighting chance as long as that Flash animation is up there.
D
This Slashdot story probably got you a good start. Hell people mentioned your site on mine after this article appeared. LOL.
I run a site that is somewhat obscure, certainly by Slashdot standards, but it does have a small community. It's also a political news forum. There are definatly some lessons along the way.
First off it takes time. I have been experiencing slow but steady growth in traffic from the beginning. It may be hard to swallow but at this point in the news forum game, barring big budgets like Plastic, I suspect slow and steady wins the race.
Secondly some people will attract much more traffic then others. The excellent staff at Geeklife have definatly pushed a lot of traffic my way. If your reading this, thanks again guys you rock. Finding sites you share common cause with and linking to each other helps.
After a quick look I would say you need more stories. The updates seem a bit sparse.Then again, what do I know.
BTW I would happily accept constructive criticism or anyone who just pops by for a visit. ;
~~ What's stopping you?
My heart bleeds for these people who aren't making any money from their sites. No, really.
I could make enough off banner ads on my own site to just about break even on the cost of maintaining it every month. But banner ads suck, and I run my site because I want to, not because I feel the need to make money from it. You unfortunates who are sliding into obscurity should probably rethink your business plan.
-Legion
There are two exceptions:
What on earth is Kerskydee.com? I can't even tell that's the spelling - the font is so ambiguous in its nature that it could be about three dozen words.
It also doesn't seem to load for me at all. Or it's still loading. Or something. Check the load time; this might be quite an interesting site, but in all honesty I can't tell.
My best marketing strategy is to hang out on freerepublic.com, a conservative news site with a lot of tinfoil hatters and armchair speculators, some of which are intelligent, others who are totally out of line. Whenever you see a discussion of aviation disasters, post intelligently with your link in the sig. That will give you more links than you can handle, especially if you promise more information about the latest terrorist theory de jour. I'm not sure how much you will like the traffic you get, but I guarantee you'll get traffic.
The NTSB seems amazingly sluggish at getting their full text accident reports online; perhaps you could get a subscription to the paper versions and scan them in? I know I find them morbidly fascinating, and I'm sure plenty of others do too. If you put the full text and images in HTML instead of that ghastly PDF, you'll get yourself a healthy number of people who will come and return just for that.
(As of this writing, I have written this message, and during all the time I have, none of the site has loaded past the "Create an Account" bar. Time to get a new host, rearchitecture your site, or whatever. Or, since I'm using Netscape 4.x, just realize you gotta close those table tags - but "Stop" is not greyed out, so I don't know if that's the reason).
Hope that helps.
D
You're streaming audio, and that's going to cost. But you've also found a way around that - send people to composers you feature at mp3.com. Also, many composers have ties to academia, where space can be available.
One thing to remember: the site isn't the community. The site is one location, like a coffee house or bar, where some of the community can meet sometimes. I've been webmastering a site for the Jazz Journalists Association since '96. Why? Because I share your belief in the value of encouraging real music. What does it cost? Well, I've built it up incrementally, so it's not a big time drain. Content is donated by association members - it's an adjunct to an already existing community. At first it was hosted at a local not-for-profit ISP I volunteered with (to learn the trade - which worked out fine for me). Then I used a couple of hosting services (service quality was problematic - it was Superb and Pair). Now it's sitting on a Speakeasy DSL line, which actually ends up getting better reports from users than hosting, and is a whole lot more convenient to administer. Plus I've got that connection for other uses, so only a portion of the cost is attributable to this project.
Does it create a sense of community? Well, the Association is growing nicely, although conducting most activities in the real world, which makes most sense for an artform that works best live anyway. Attempts to get visitor discussions going on a BBS-type section haven't gone anywhere. People do add occassional comments to stories - but we're not set up as a weblog. Special events where journalists log on together for a few hours to publicly discuss a special topic, with questions coming in from the public, have some success - especially when they draw in existing communities, for instance from special-purpose mailing lists on the topics.
Money? Nope. Referrals for book and record sales have brought zilch. Taking the Association to a formal not-for-profit and pursing grants is the long-term plan.
But to reiterate: It's rare to form a brand new community. But communities are out there, and adding new service for an existing community can more likely find at least modest success, especially if you can piggyback your hosting and connectivity on systems and lines you have other good uses for.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Writing clearly and correctly helps. IMO if you really want to generate attention, you need to address a concern that affects many people or a smaller concern that affects a more rabid group of people. Pop culture wonders like "All your base," the dancing hamsters, and (going back to the 70's) the pet rock are pretty cool, but I don't have a clue how you maintain long-term interest in that, :-). YMMV?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
how to initially draw people to a community when the a community itself is the selling point
There's the whole problem, right there, wrong attitude. The instant you start to think about "selling" something, you've lost it. The whole point of the web is publishing among equal peers. If you try to squeeze money off someone else's interests, to become the asshole in the middle, you will be replaced and fast.
A friend asked me the other day, "Linux, who uses that?" My answer is that I could care less. The same thing goes for my little ftp site, any software I actually write, and any "community" pages I ever try to build. I'd be happy if anyone enjoys my stuff and contributes to it, but I won't be too sad if they have something better.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
It's difficult to find a happy medium really. My personal site is not commercial, and was never designed to pay its own way - however its popularity has meant I have to pay out more and more of my own cash to keep it online (bandwidth charges). It's nice at first to see hundreds, and then thousands of page requests per day, but now I actually wish it WASN'T quite so popular! I guess I'll have to add a few fake popup ads to drive some people away :-))
:-)
BTW, please don't visit my site
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
OK, I'm gonna get it for saying this...
The Internet is not the future. It is a poor substitute for analog transmission. In other words , the Internet fails as a mass communications technology. Digital transmissions are bulky and not practical for an instant World communications delivery medium. Note the word instant.
Remember what CNN had to do on 9/11 when their servers got millions of calls at once? I take that as recent proof of the Internets failure as a mass medium. Don't give me scientific improvements either. That's just grist for the masses.
What the heck is wrong with radio waves anyho? Am I nuts? I've been in this IT/Digital world for some time now and you know what? Web pages are sloooow even with a T1. Streaming video is a joke. And reading text on a monitor is like wiping your eyes with sandpaper (my eyes have been red and blurry for 5 long HelpDesk years). The Net is empty of content due to legal issues and out and out theft. Despite the promise of free information accessed from anywhere, the Net offers less information in order to serve the most people. It's a physical necessity for the data!
Everyone sees this stuff as the future, or the present at least. Personally, I find it frustrating, boring, and never, ever, lives up to the promise of the company. Never.
At least Linux is cheap and doesn't lie about being a pain in the ass (to set up, but after that...). Let's face it, the Internet was best as just bulletin boards. Though I love playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein online. Since DOOM, the potential of the Internet was seen... at least by kids. But to add pictures and video... it just can't do it and I don't believe it will be accomplished with any alacrity in the future. Empty promises imho.
people need to feel a vested interest in their community. they want new stuff.
a site creator cannot simply put up a website designed for user generated content and then just let it run and see what happens. she needs to involve herself in every aspect of the site... add new features the users will recognize and appreciate.
host events, get -involved-. the more time, effort, work, passion, and interest that the creator puts into the site, the more users will feed off of that and keep returning to the site.
if you love it, and you build it, they will come.
My Community Website.
The only new sites I go to are the ones I find through Google while trying to answer questions. If your site is the only one that can answer my question, I will find it. If yours is one of a hundred, I won't ever visit it.
People come up with an idea, are enthused about it, pursue it for a while, become bored, and leave it.
Companies spring into being, try to market things, and make it or don't.
Everything is cyclical and fluid, on the net even more so. People will congregate like a flock of birds, then fly apart. Be happy that you were the focal point of a congregation for a while, that you brought interesting things and thoughts to somebody, and move on.
*shrug*
The web fails as an information medium because people's most frequent questions when finding online information are "Where do I start?" and "Where do I go from here?"
As you might have learned once or more in any practical science or statistics class, Data is meaningless! For data to be useful it must be filtered and organized into information. The web has tons of data, but overall a very low percentage of it is usable information.
This is very evident in the overwhelming use of search portals -- Google, Yahoo, NorthernLignt, whatever. They put a very thin film of organization on web data. The sad fact is that the organization is hardly trustworthy.
Imagine all the books you've ever seen stacked in a warehouse. That's the web right now. The early idea was to organize web content using TLDs and meaningful URLs. You all know how successful that's been. The web needs meaningful, navigable data content organization.
Libraries have developed a marvelous content organization scheme. I can go to any library of any size, look in a master list for the topic call number, and then look at the numbers on the ends of the stacks and find any book in a matter of minutes. The only drawback is that a book may be in use, a drawback that the web will elminate. That very same numbering system should be immediately applicable to any web content. It's all there, folks. We just need to find a way to adapt it to online content.
This isn't a new problem. The libraries have done it for nearly a century now. Here's the queston. How do we implement it?
- Sig this!
Alan Kay described the missing piece of information-laden systems very well many years ago, saying that until computers can respond *intelligently* to the request, "Show me something interesting," we still have a long way to go. We're still just following paths, for the most part. "Generally, when you are finding things, the last thing you want to do is follow paths," Kay said in 1988, talking about how user interfaces were becoming inadequate. "You need something that gets you to the general area, then you follow a path, because most of the stuff you want, you don't even think of. It's very hard to remember all the things you're interested in." That's still true and we still don't have systems that respond with much intelligence to "Show me something interesting."
If you site is dying it is time to re-evaluate your initial assumptions about the visitor market segment that your site is suppose to appeal to.
Build a good site, update it regularly, and offer visible community features. But DON'T let the community be the entire site.
The real key is that last part. Personally, I think sites like Wikipedia are poorly designed because the community is the entire website. That's just plain stupid, and it takes several years or a bizarre miracle to work. The real way to build a community is to create a regularly updated site with both news and content, tethered to a broad but somewhat specific subject. In other words, you want Slashdot. Slashdot news and articles centered around the topic of technology, with a community built up around it via comments/talkback.
But I think the real key, in the end, is not to look like you're really trying to build a community. If you just build a good site and offer community features, that community will build up and eventually it will be large enough that it can either become a main feature of the site or 90% of the site itself, creating its own content off-shoots like Ask Slashdot.
this will be an even bigger problem is google starts to let users vot on websites, because only the most popular will appear, and we won't be able to get the wacky, obscure sites that perhaps are different, but provied better information. Slashdot is very popular, and will return a lot of hits when someone types in something like "tech news" but then some of the more obscure, but more /in depth/ sites will be ignored.
In any case, as The Belfry is an index, a lot of comics linked from it are dubious at best. Sturgeon's Law prevails. There are some gems in there, though.
I don't know the fellow who submitted the link to slashdot. It was a total surprise to me. Thank goodness for our PacketShaper, though.
Recently, just for the hell of it, I created a 'community' site for the 'physical' community I live in - a rural Montana valley, PettyCreek.Net. So I created it, registered it with the search engines. I'm also going to use some free advertising to promote it. If my neighbors find it, I hope they'll find it useful.
The line lengths and lack of white space make me dizzy. If anyone wonders why websites don't get read...
What would it have cost to do the same thing if you'd started 10 years earlier? Personally I'm in awe of the fact that so much can be done with so little today. I only hope this new meduim isn't choked off by "status quo" laws like the DMCA.
As for making money... 82,500 visitors a year (226/day) for 4 years. I'd put some banners up. Attempting to avoid banners entirely really will keep you from making money. Every successful(financially) site I've ever seen uses banners of one form or another(yes I consider google adwords, and many other things, to be banners). For those that *hate* banners you could have a $ubscription $ervice. My favorite comic does just this.
226 visitors a day is a fair number, and it should be enough to offset your $5000/year, but it certainly isn't enough to make a living off of. I'd say for each "devoted"(ie: daily) user expect no more than $50/year in earnings. 226*$50 = $11,300/year. That should be the most you could reasonably expect to earn off the traffic you currently have. (assuming constant traffic all 4 years) That's when you use banners and all other tools at your disposal. Without them it's obviously much less. Honestly, I have to admit, if banners are done correctly I actually *like* them. (correctly means small targeted and no flashing!)
Send out lots of bulk email. Announce your website in a usenet article, cross-posted to many unrelated groups. Announce it in replies to random slashdot posts. Mention it in an Ask Slashdot. Print it up on plastic coroplast signs and put the signs on utility poles at all the busy intersections in your city. Try a snailmail chain letter. Run an infomercial on TV.
One person can only view so many sites. Eventually that person has to turn thier attention to other things, like working, eating, sleeping, etc. Get the picture?
Want more hits? Just tell people they are not allowed to link to your site.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.