When Websites Outgrow Their Webmasters? 15
"Does one soil their site with banners? If so, who pays out without requiring a percentage of click-throughs and who doesn't welch on their payments? Do you forego advertising and charge members directly for a yearly subscription to your service? Do you let users bankroll their accounts and then draw from their credited monies each time they use your service? How do you strike a balance that allows you to keep funding the site and not drive your users away?
Finally, who do you go to when you realize you can't do everything yourself? Is there anyone you can trust to acquire advertising, funding, a business-plan and other necessities of a growing online organization? I don't want to lose a good thing simply because I wasn't a business major and didn't know who to call when the job required more than one part-timer (me).
For me, this was never about money and it still isn't -- I just don't want to go broke trying to fund a 'hobby'."
A fine example... (Score:3)
Unfortunately, this post may be a little vague (and LONG). Please bear with me, since a few people might learn from my mistakes.
I started a webpage a little bit after coming back from E3 1998 on Pokemon (yeah, I know). I was a big fan at the time, and I figured that making a webpage on the subject would be a good idea seeing that there were a total of TWO English webpages on it at the time. So I contacted the owner of one of the japanese sites I visited regularily [rim.or.jp], and kept in touch with him while getting more information about the Japanese shows.
My webpage was finally completed two months later. My site was being hosted by a service provider that I had been with for a while, and while I had to pay for my site to be hosted (I had another webpage at the time), it was TOO bad -- only $25 USD/year.
Not many people visited my site, since the craze hadn't started yet. I was barely getting any hits, and my daily bandwidth was virtually non-existent.
I'd also like to point out at this point that I didn't have a single banner ad on my site, and that yearly $25 USD was coming out of my own pocket. This was probably my first mistake.
In September of that year, I started Computer Systems Tech. at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology [nait.ab.ca]. It's also when the craze REALLY started, and my bandwidth shot up like a rocket.
I was striving for my page to be the most complete page about the subject that was out there -- definetely my second mistake. My focus was entirely too wide, and as a result, it took me about 5-6 hours every night to update my page. Combined with married life and school, the whole thing was starting to become a big strain on me by December of that year. I was working alone on this page, and I didn't think of asking anyone to help me. (BIG mistake!)
I had on my page pictures, small MPEG movies and a ton of information. In January or February of the following year, I found that my bandwith had shot up to a whopping 1 GB per day. 1 GB! I didn't say anything to my service provider, since the rate for such traffic was higher than I could afford. I also found out that people were blatantly stealing my content, word for word, and placing it on their sites with MY links, and calling it their own. Updates were starting to get sparse at this point, since I was in second semester, and I was getting about 400 e-mails per day.
Around this time, my service provider got bought by another company, and their cheerfully advised me to lower my bandwith to 200 MB/day or they'd have to make me pay $1,000 USD/year to keep the page hosted. Considering that I was a jobless college student, I asked if there were ways so that people could stop linking to my stuff. They said that there was, and they'd "get back to me". They never did.
Finally, I think it was a few months after that that I gave up entirely on the site. It pained me because I had put in so much work, money and effort into it. They advised me that I had to pay the above amount in 15 days or my account would be locked. Strangely enough, the page hasn't been deleted yet (and it's been two years), but I can't even go into my account and delete everything myself to save face.
The moral of this story, webmasters, is this:
This was long, but I hope someone's going to benefit from this. The page is still out there, by the way, but I sure as heck won't put the URL here. It's not that I think my page sucks because of what the content is... it's that I'm ashamed to have been forced to just let it moulder out there in the vastness of cyberspace.
- Firecaster
29 days until I graduate
Re:tough proposition. (Score:3)
A pay-for-service (set monthly or yearly fee per account) seems to be have a greater profit potential and it would probably also help weed-out most of the people who create fake accounts just to cause trouble on the website. Then the problem is how to keep from undercharging or overcharging for the service.
I know that some people who use my site make their entire living from it or have grown their own businesses through it. A lot of people are willing to pay for the service and I've had people over the last few months wanting an address to send donations or offering to help run the site.
The problem with donations is that it would take a lot to keep the site going and I didn't want to take donations until I knew if I would eventually charge for the site anyway. And the problem with having users help run the site is that the code is not yet ready for assistant staff members to perform things and putting 6,000 user's account information in the reach of relatively unknown individuals is too risky at this point.
I've been so busy over this last year that most email can go for a month or two before I have time to read and respond to it. I only have time to resolve problems when they are so huge that everyone is complaining about it and sometimes I don't even visit my own site for months on end. It's amazing that the site practically runs and polices itself -- but it still needs some TLC to really run smoothly.
Thankfully, some friends are my webhosts and they're letting me off with more bandwidth than I'm paying for -- otherwise I would go broke, even with the decent salary I make. For what is mostly an all-text site, I'm eating up more than 400mb of bandwidth per day.
I've had no problems running the site for free as long as the monitary cost to me was not all that large. It's an interesting hobby and I've learned a lot about Perl and handling large groups of users in an internet-based service. But while 95% of my members understand the difficult situation I'm in and that I can't always respond to them immediately (or even at all sometimes), there are the other 5% who say things like "If someone puts up a website, they should be responsible for taking care of it, no matter what!" and who act like I owe them a kidney or something.
In fact, there are enough people with that mode of thinking that, coupled with the other random problems associated with a site like this, that I no longer feel compelled to keep the site running unless it can pay for itself and run itself (or hire staff to do it for me) without sucking up so much of my own time. If it can make a profit -- that would be cool, but that isn't the goal.
Of course, the other thing that has concerned me is that I might be missing out on something huge. All of my friends and business associates over th e last two years have tried to convince me to sell the site or start making money with it. I guess that wouldn't be 'selling-out'. I mean, someone who runs a comic book shop isn't selling out just because they're making money off of something they enjoy doing... The Catch-22 is that if I try to make something profitable out of a site (or at least profitable enough to pay for itself), there's the risk of losing it outright. But if I don't, it might crumble under its own weight. And how many other chances does a guy get to come up with a hit website with potential? This may be my only chance, right?
I'm considering dropping a couple grand on some friends to rewrite my site's code so it's faster (SQL, mod_perl) and more reliable and expandable. Perhaps I'll have them write the staff-administration features I've been meaning to write myself so I can let others run most of the site for me... You have to invest money to make money, right? And I guess if things get bad, all I'll have done is lost a couple thousand bucks and a website...?
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seumas.com
duh... (Score:1)
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
Re:Ads are 'probably' the only way.... (Score:2)
Plus, instead of killing an account and having the user create three more in its place, it'll cost them $10 for every account they want to create and have yanked.
I can't think of many other solutions to the concern of fruadulent members...
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seumas.com
Re:Upgrade (Score:2)
*splutter*
Aww, come on, he does have a point:
Frequent blue screens can be used to limit your site's traffic to manageable levels!
tough proposition. (Score:2)
Before you get to that point, though you have to answer some questions. "What are my priorities?"
Is your first priority keeping your customer base?
Is it making something viable out of your hobby?
Is it that you keep control of the site somehow?
If you want to learn how some auction sites got to be profitable, any of them who've IPO'd are required to make financial statments available to current and prospective shareholders. So check out eBay's statments [shareholder.com], see where their income comes from. Not quite looking at the source code for it... but it may be as useful as a header file. You'll probably see that the business needs to attain some sort of critical mass before it can make money the way eBay does. But look through the publicly available data to see how it works.
You seem to be particularly worried about customers rejecting banner ads. Unless you're billing yourself as "the lynx friendly auction site" or something, you shouldn't really have to worry. It will be something of a pain, and it won't save your site, but it should allow you to recoup some of your money... And i immagine that most banner services already have information [doubleclick.net] on the finer points of joining and billing and stuff.
I don't know. Even if i did, i couldn't tell you, since i'm not an insured professional. But the first step in finding the answer is having a better idea of what you want.
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alt.geek
Ads are 'probably' the only way.... (Score:2)
You could try lightly littering the lists of auction items with links to affiliates but I don't know of anybody who's made much money this way except maybe the people you'll affiliate with.
I've been using an Internet Ad agency, called amazing media [amazingmedia.com] that seem reasonably leanient towards clickthroughs and page views. You obviously get more money for higher clickthoughs but a low amount still pays something. Also a low pageview rate is acceptable, I signed up with about 3000 pageviews PCM. My reason for doing it was that if everybody else was making money out of ads why can't I.
I haven't recieved a single cent yet so maybe it's all a load of Fetid Dingo's Kidneys [h2g2.com], and I've wasted my time.
It's been a long time since I did any thorough research into this so I'm sure that by now there are plenty of similar and better offers out there, but I just haven't been bothered to look.
Experience of running a web provider solo (Score:3)
I have a feeling this will come out as more of a "how not to do things" than any sort of real useful information, but here goes...
Way back in December 1994, I got myself a shiny new 14.4k modem, and leveraged sysop privileges at my high school (I was a senior at the time) to get a dedicated IP on the school's dialup server. I set up a little anonymous FTP site with a number of music samples--this was back in the days when 22k stereo was a luxury--and MOD files, and let 'er rip, so to speak. Well, word spread, and that good old 14.4k modem got a whole bunch of exercise.
In late August 1995 I started university, and took advantage of the Ethernet connection there to keep the FTP service going--although with the change of address some of the traffic obviously dropped off. It was at this point that an acquaintance came to me and asked if I could host his home page on my computer, since it was getting too big for his ISP's likes. I said sure, no problem, and wrote myself a little HTTP daemon (I was using an Amiga at the time) to do the job. So far, so good.
Later that same month, someone I didn't know sent me a message asking if I could host their page, too. I was feeling magnanimous, and said sure, why not. As a few more such requests came in and my Amiga started floundering under the load, I decided to get a Linux box instead--and put up a little page saying "Free accounts here, just send mail." That was my mistake. <weak grin>
Boy, did they ever come. I had something around 500 users when I had to take my system home for the summer the following May. I proceeded to get an ISDN line installed at home--this is all coming out of my pocket, remember--and served through that for the summer, though the bandwidth wasn't even close to sufficient and the line was a whole month late in coming in. (Thank you, Bell Atlantic.)
When I finally got the system back to school, the account request floodgates opened, and when I finally cut off new accounts in December--the university's datacomm department gave me a friendly little call saying "your bandwidth use is just a bit high"--I had 5000 users and was serving close to 2Mbps consistently. I also had to do a number of server upgrades in there, and even so server response times were dismal. And on top of all that, I have to deal with user mail as well (though I did have some on-and-off volunteer help on that front).
This is still all coming out of my pocket, and now the school's mad at me too, so I figure the only option left is to go commercial. So I talked around to service providers I knew, ran a bunch of numbers, and eventually set the price at $25/year. I sent out mail to all the users and set the payment deadline for April. Naturally a bunch of users left, but about 350 remained, which was more or less in line with my projections.
So Dragonfire Internet Services, as I had named it some time earlier, turned into a commercial operation, and things were once again happy. The only catch, of course, was that if the server needed physical maintenance I had to haul myself down to the colo center--which happened a number of times over the years I ran Dragonfire, and itself was a moderate pain in the pocket.
Well, things were all fine and dandy until my colo provider tripled (yes, tripled) my connectivity cost. I argued and argued, but lost in the end, and in order to not lose money, I had to raise prices. And to make things worse, whether from simple load or some other problem, server response was dropping off again, making people even less happy. But most of them were still willing to keep their accounts at $40/year (a fact for which I'm grateful). I seem to
In October of 1998, I applied to, and was accepted to, an overseas internship program with a Japanese software company (the same company I work for now, as a matter of fact). Between that and the fact that Dragonfire still wasn't behaving well, much less making any significant amount of money, I decided to just transfer it to an acquaintance of mine who at least claimed to have experience and interest in running a provider (though I've long since come to doubt that from the reports I hear).
Ironically, Dragonfire finally stabilized shortly after that, and set a record by staying up for the whole month of December until it moved to its new location. But since I knew I wouldn't be able to do anything with it from Japan anyway, I just transitioned myself out and let things go. Which was not easy, I have to admit; however many problems the service had, it was something I'd "raised," so to speak. But anyway, I left Dragonfire in other hands and went my own way.
(And I'm still several thousand bucks in the hole.)
So, here's what that experience left with me, aside from a bunch of knowledge about how to run servers:
Dunno if that was any help or not, but there you go.
Partnerships (Score:2)
Banner Ads don't make you profitable. I moved on to the marketing side of the IT world a little while back, and it's clearly known that funding a company through banner ads doesn't work. In your case, you may recoup some of your costs, but probably not enough to cover the site.
Your best option, in my opinion, is strategic partnerships. Now this doesn't mean that your auction site has to be owned by some big evil empire; it simply means that you offer to promote/link to companies who target the same market as you, but offer different services.
An example of this is the escrow and appraisal services associated with eBay. These services represent particular companies, who make money off these services.
It may take some research to figure out what your target user is like, what companies offer services that target this user, and (biggest problem) how to attract these companies. But ultimately it may prove more valuable -- find a company that offers your users a related service, and exchange promotion for money, resources, etc.
Good luck.
Why should that be Offtopic'd? (Score:1)
Re:Upgrade (Score:1)
Re:tough proposition. (Score:1)
Re:Ads are 'probably' the only way.... (Score:2)
What I can be convinced to pay for is advertising what I have to sell. If I want to sell something I have a few options, I can buy an ad in the local paper (~$15), I can make 100 posters and stick them to telephone poles (~$8 + 2hours of my time), I could put a sign in my front yard and hope someone sees it (~$5 for paint, plywood etc.), but regardless all of these are going to cost me something. On the other hand, with any of these methods of selling things the advertising cost won't be payed directly by the buyer. There's no way that I could charge admission to look at the used car I want to sell. That's just not how business gets done.
_____________
Make Money Fast!!!!! (Score:3)
Anyway, I poked around and found your auction site, and you've got 1300 or so auctions running right this minute. Why don't you do what eBay does and charge a small fee (percentage?) for each auction listed? If you charged a buck an item, that'd be $1300 right now. Plus, the bandwidth bill will be (pretty much) a function of the number of auctions, so this will scale well if your site grows. If you feel bad about charging, remember that people are making money off of your site (and your hard work), and you should get a little of it for helping them make that money.
A lot of people talk about how this is a new economy, how we're breaking boundries, etc. Most of the time when they are saying this they think it's revolutionary to select items from a catalog and buy them with credit cards. Bullshit. This is only a new economy if you can figure out how to provide a service that people will pay for. Luckily, you have, now you just need to start charging them.
Good luck!
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Web Sites Going Commercial (Score:1)