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Ask YC: What do you think about our hug-or-ditch network?

5 points by cawel ↗ HN
My brother (matstc) and I had about a week of free time recently and we decided to build a few websites along the concept of "Hot or Not" (that is, a simple interactive rating site):

  www.hugamovie.com
  www.hugacity.com
  www.hugamusic.com
  www.huganoodle.com
We're aware it's not rocket science and we're not going to get rich with it. But we had fun in the process and it allowed us to experiment with a few toys: Rails, Google AdSense, Amazon associates. Our 4 sites have been running for a week now, and we would be interested to get your feedback on about anything related to those sites.

Here for starters: Do you like the simple design? Any suggestions to maximize the revenue? Is it a good choice to use Google AdSense on these kinds of sites? What's your experience with being an Amazon associate (our ads in the bottom-left corner)?

12 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 36.5 ms ] thread
eusman
I tried it a bit. Maybe there should be a skip link because it's impossible of course to rate a movie without actually watching it...

The challenge will be to find features that will make it go viral...

cawel
Yeah. We pondered about this 'skip button' and decided not to put it in order to keep the voting interface simple and because you can always click on the 'get random movie' link (although admittedly far away from the voting panel).
eusman
i didn't see that, maybe you can rename 'get random movie' to 'skip' or have have both in different locations and monitor user behaviour to see what works
cawel
That's an idea. We've just put a 'skip link' under the voting panel on www.hugamovie.com, and we'll see how often people will use it.
enomar
If you want to improve your design, don't ask a bunch of geeks. Ask your users.

Automate the process of doing A/B studies. In other words, make it easy for you to test a different layout against the existing one. 10-20% of your users should see the test design. This will give you concreate data on how your changes improve things like stickiness and ad clicks. Keep what works. Rinse, repeat, get rich :)

aneesh
Geeks can be users too!
cawel
Thanks for your input. The 4 sites have been launched recently, so our user base is quite small at the moment! We are getting feedback from other channels too, but we think getting comments/advices from geeks is quite valuable (especially regarding the use of AdSense, the Amazon associates program, and the concept in general), even if those comments are short and simple.

And I guess your strategy for ads placements will probably be more relevant later on, if the traffic ever justifies it.

LukeKrogh
I agree with eusman about the "skip" verbage.

I know this is a large change to the site but my opinion nonetheless -> I think a battle type system such as www.puppywar.com would be more successful.

First it's statistically more accurate. I also think people find the comparing of photos to be more fun/addictive.

matstc
I agree with you that a battle system could be more addictive. I'm just not sure how that would work with something like movies or artists, where the user already has an opinion on the two options, which might not be that comparable (eg a comedy vs. a drama). For puppies, kittens, or people, it's always possible to make up an opinion on the spot.
adduc
Going off hug a movie, the site seems a little slow in loading, which goes against the purpose of the page, which looks to be rating items at a fast interval.
cawel
We're (sadly) aware of this problem. Since we're using fcgi, the processes are not in memory all the time, which means a slow loading time if the fcgi is not in memory at that time.

We are using HostingRails for hosting, but I'm guessing it's a recurrent problem regardless of the hosting provider.

Mongrel would solve the problem (since it would have dedicated memory), if we would be ready to spend a few bucks more...