Ask HN/PG: How long does it take a social news site to live on it's own?
So, I soft launched my economic and financial social news site, http://Newsley.com two months ago. So far, I've had around 500 uniques and I've served around 2000 pages. I'm fairly happy with that start, but I have no idea what to expect in terms of traffic and growth. The vibe that I get is that at some point, the site will reach a critical mass, and then the community will take on a life of it's own. How long does it take to get to that point? I know sometimes it's never. I'd love to hear some anecdotes from people in similar situations.
My guess is that it takes about a year. I've been looking at the internet archive of Reddit: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://reddit.com and it seems like it took them about a year to have people comment on articles on a regular basis.
I'd love to hear some thoughts, experiences, from people who were in similar situations. And, any tips along the way on getting to the first 5k users, would be greatly appreciated.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 74.4 ms ] threadI've been looking for an economics-centered version of HN for the past few weeks, and seeing as how newmogul isn't being run anymore, your site becomes an appealing candidate. However, the design makes for a somewhat unpleasant experience, so a few suggestions would be to back off the italics and big bolding, go for sans-serif fonts, and color some of the supplemental informational text lighter shades of gray because with everything just black now, the site looks too noisy.
markenomics.com is an alternative to NM
Serifed fonts can be easier to read, particularly when there is a lot of text involved.
San serif is easier to read on a screen because screen resolution is not as good as paper. Specific serif fonts may work on screen.
I haven't seen an e-ink screen to see if that's different from normal screens.
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=serif+san-serif+...
We didn't have comments on reddit until mid Dec. 2005 (site launched June of that year) so our 'holy shit this might actually work moment' actually came over that YC summer based on submissions.
For the first, say, month, I was actively submitting links under multiple screenames (thanks to a simple little formfield Steve added to our admin submit page - long since removed). Steve did it as well, but he was spending most of his time, you know, building reddit.
Seeding a nascent social news site is one of the many unglamorous things the non-programming cofounder does in those crucial early startup months :) as well as browbeating friends and family into contributing as well.
But we had a day that summer when neither Steve nor I did anything on reddit except read and vote; I'd like to dig through my email and half-assed journal from that time to give you an exact date, but I haven't got it handy. But it happened within the first 3 months.
Why?
Well, at the time, we were filling a need that wasn't really satisfied many other places. I don't believe there's any dominant economic/financial social news site out there (I can't even think of any aside from Newsley, well, and /r/economics). So you've got an advantage there in that you don't need to convince people away from a similar resource as much as you need to show them this is just more efficient than how they're getting their news now (editorial-picked front pages).
On that note, you should really play up the fact that it's a "Marketplace of ideas and news, where the best bubble up and the worst fall into obscurity." Most folks interested in that space will already have an affinity for the perfection of a free market, which is essentially how these sites work. Of course, like any market, it succumbs to the whims of irrational crowds at times... but that's another post.
The other thing that helped us tremendously was getting written up by PG in an essay and more broadly, being the first YC company in the first YC class to launch. Paul and Y Combinator already had a following that was going to take an interest in reddit just because of its association with the two. And when they stuck around, Paul Graham readers tend to be the perfect kind of early users for a social news site you'd like to promote thoughtful news/ideas over, say, the crap on CNN.
As for reddit these days, heh, it's rather varied.
Oh, and I don't see any kind of stats system for your community. Believe it or not, karma was a huge incentive for our early users, some of whom would let us know the site was broken because stats weren't being calculated properly. It's not what's going to motivate everyone to submit, but for those it resonates with, it's a great incentive.
tl;dr It took us only a few months for reddit to be self-sufficient, but that was largely thanks to the YC and PG connection (and his writeup). Since those aren't replicable, I'd suggest getting in touch with someone who is a PG in the finance/economics online world and email her. I suspect you've got some in mind who you already read regularly, so write not as a pitching CEO, but as a reader & fan of her work. It may not go anywhere, but it'll only take a few minutes, and the upside is limitless...
And, good call on the marketplace of ideas angle. That's brilliant. I was looking at some of Reddit's early tag lines, and I think I'm going to borrow/steal that idea. :)
re: the PG connection. That article is how I found you guys, and I've been reading reddit ever since. I had a hunch that PG's readership was huge in getting Reddit off the ground. And, You're absolutely right in emailing media people in the economics world and asking them their opinions on the site. I need to get cracking on that.
Thanks again.
Also, if you haven't already, I hope you're going to steal our source. Or at least read through it for ideas. http://code.reddit.com
Showing the summary of the story is a REALLY good idea. It's also cool that it gets the summary for you, and you can change it if you want. The font is a bit cramped-together and small. It's pretty unpleasant to look at. What is your bounce rate? I think changing the font to make it initially more comfortable to look at might improve your bounce rate. I don't mean serif to sans-serif. Your font is so serify that it looks italicized. There are lots of lighter serif fonts.
re: the font. I'll have to mess around with the fontography and see what I can do. The summaries are italicized right now. Is that what you're referring to? If those are hard to read, I can change that around.
re: the summaries. Thanks for the feedback. I thought long and hard about that, and one of the big reasons that I did it, was SEO. I thought that Google would appreciate a few more sentences per link to index and rank a bit better for the keywords I'm targeting.
Thanks for the feedback on the summary extraction. I worked pretty long and hard on that one. It's suprisingly challenging. I'm glad it's worked for you so far.
The trick? Have a popular site in the niche you can use to promote the heck out of the new site ;-) Stack Overflow is a great example of this technique working on a bigger scale.
I ask because I'm interested in a couple of other subject areas and considering building a similar style of site and thus wondering what realistic expectations should be re. the potential for direct monetization.
There was a huge cluster of keywords on that list that had to do with financial topics. Not only that, but financial services account for 20-25% of all online ad spend. That tells me that there are advertisers that are going to be interested in a niche readership that are interested in economics and financial news.
So, my hypothesis is that ad rates for a niche site focused on financial and economic news will be able to use advertising as a revenue stream. To test that hypothesis, I put up some adsense ads two weeks ago, and I got $1 - $1.50 a click. I'm pretty happy with that.