Depends on how he decides to monetize it I guess. But at the very least a better designed site gives the impression of professionalism and security, and users who trust you will also trust you with their money. Also a better organized (I think less noisy) site would make the ads easier to see and more relevant.
Although for me, the bigger issue is finding what Twicsy offers that's worth paying for?
It might solve the "unfundable" and "piece of shit" adjectives in the title.
pretty much the whole Internet is built on the idea that if you can get metrics like his up, and get funded, you can figure out monetization with the help of your expert investors.
That's not going to help his revenue problem, probably. The only thing I can think of is if he--in addition to making it look appealing--somehow places targeted ads based on user queries, in the midst of their search results. This is essentially the "killer" strategy a lot of companies like FB and Twitter have started using. Make ads a seamless part of the scenery. Not as annoying sidebar shit that no one ever looks at.
Why does he say "really successful" in the title, if it doesn't even break even?
EDIT: Must be the traffic, but these days that's not (that) impressive if there's no revenue model around it. That said, I'd love 6 million users/month.
EDIT 2: downvotes? I guess funding = success still around here, huh?
eh, I'd take it. Bandwidth is cheap... and I have the sort of ego that derives a lot of pleasure from creating something that other people find useful and use.
The ten years included several startups. And while it appears all eventually failed or were put in the back-burner, he did raise $2 million in angel funding along the way. So, at least in regards to keeping himself housed and fed, I guess it was successful.
I actually meant to put successful in quotes but then forgot. The way I meant it is, if you had told me I would be seeing 6 million unique visitors per month when I first started out I would have definitely said that is a huge success. In some ways it is, but obviously not the most important way. I definitely agree that raising money is not success, and actually all of the money raised was prior to launching Twicsy.
Sharing some of the analytics behind how you think people use the site would probably make for a much more interesting discussion around monetization.
EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing.
And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc?
Those are dramatically different user segments / values.
You've got a bit of a 31-flavors UX where I can do a lot, but as a result wonder if you could massively pare this down, improve focus, and discover monetization through understanding what people actually use it for.
SEO is the largest feeder of traffic for Twicsy. People get there by searching for a very long tail of things. But there are quite a few that return just to browse around it seems, or check out the top photos.
Agreed, the UX/UI is terrible. One big problem is that I am a terrible web developer, I am really just a back end data guy that knows enough to be dangerous on the front end.
But that's part of the reason why I think it has much more potential. The site gets a ton of traffic despite its obvious flaws. If I had the funds to do a redesign and even execute well on the basics who knows what could happen?
I think he'll get money along the way. Link to his portfolio, more followers on Twitter, more people knowing what he does and everything else that comes with popularity.
Free because I think the project has potential but the developer seems to not be interested in investing money on a redesign. If a free design can renew interest in the project, I think its a worthwhile cause.
On a related note, I also do free designs for open source projects (eg. vlc, ack). So if your have an open source project that you think could benefit from design, feel free to get in touch with me.
Working on such project helps me not just get my name out there, but also lets me learn a lot more than I can in commercial projects, since I usually get more creative freedom when I'm contributing my time rather than being paid for it.
Given how long you've been doing this, you've overlapped with my last startup, which had similar issues (Edgeio.com - long since defunct; we started development in 2005; sold off the assets end of 2007; the service was a classified aggregator).
We got a huge amount of traffic via SEO, and lots of long tail traffic (e.g. we'd come up first for a huge number of zip codes). A big problem with our consumer site was atrocious bounce rates: Most people clicked through out of curiosity, looked around on that single page or maybe one more, and left never to be seen again, because we did a really poor job of hooking them unless they happened to be looking for classified ads matching that particular long tail term, which few were. We should in retrospect have treated those visits as someone watching an ad for our site, rather than as a conscious visit by a user of our site, because most of our traffic was from people who likely did not even realise what the site was about by the time they clicked back or closed the window.
A big part of the challenge for you as well, I think, is driving down bounce rates and challenging those users into other parts of the site and to repeat visits by helping them "get" what they can get out of the site other than 15 seconds of looking at that one image.
If I was you, I'd segment users hard on referrals vs. direct traffic and cookied vs. uncookied (assume first time visitors). First of all, are you earning any money on those first time referral users? If not, that gives you total freedom to experiment. But regardless, subject the first time referred users to an absolute battery of segmented tests (A/B or multivariate or whatever scheme you're comfortable you can analyze results from) with pretty much the sole purpose of figuring out how to get more of those users to visit more sticky pages. Especially if people are coming in from long tail searches, I think you'd be better focusing on turning them into users than "drive by" assaulting them with ads like it feels like the site currently is doing.
E.g. consider imgur. Consider users coming to imgur pages from Reddit (consider your specific traffic sources, and whether or not you can do anything "special" for them)- not only do they get an interface to navigate that in many cases are more convenient than continuing to browse the equivalent image reddits, but you can even go to imgur.com/r/someimagereddit (e.g. http://imgur.com/r/pics) and get all the pictures from that subreddit in one place. It's seductive. Then there's ability to comment. The image pages themselves are extremely clean. It's seductive.
While if I get to your site from Google search results (say by entering "twitter babes" and going to the image results - I tested, it gives a Twicsy result high up, in between the porn), I need to go below the fold to even realize that there are related pictures, and there are no "niceties" like being able to use cursor left/right to move through a "gallery", or space to enlarge the image, as on imgur.com (if there are on Twicsy, I didn't notice them). What is there is massively distracting ads.
Imgur is teasing people in when they hit it for the first time, making it very tempting to click one more image, while your site is pretty much bunching people in the face with ads, which makes it hard to even discover the potential.
I agree wholeheartedly with a lot of what you are saying. As I talked to many many people this year about funding and strategy for Twicsy I came to the conclusion that Twicsy needs to start funneling the pictures into topical verticals. I think this would help for 3 reasons:
1. It would increase engagement with users. I think they would finally understand how Twicsy could be an interesting daily destination because they could just focus on their topics of interest.
2. It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against porn, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers, and allow us to target said advertising more easily. For popular verticals we could do direct ad sales which would be >100x more lucrative than the crap we serve now.
3. I think it would facilitate media partnerships. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but I think that if number 1 holds true that we could land partners for popular verticals.
The problems are that I basically ran out of time and money to be able to execute on this. I need money for a complete redesign to shift the focus to the topical verticals, and I need more time to execute on the back end tech to fill these verticals (maybe 2 months). I didn't need a ton of money, but even in this "easy time to raise money" I was unable to find an investor. I think the biggest reason for this is that I don't have a well rounded team in place, so part of this year I spent looking for a partner to focus on the business side. I was hoping I would meet someone that saw the potential as I did and believed we were right on the verge of something big. But I never found that person.
On repeat visits, yes the number of people that visit us just once is quite high. 5.8 million of the past 7.6 million visits were just one-timers. But there were over 350k people that visited us 9 or more times last month. And there were over 35k people that visited us 201 or more times. So that gives me reason to believe there are some real Twicsy fans out there! And, as I repeatedly say, we are succeeding despite the glaring drawbacks and problems with the site. Imagine if it wasn't such a piece of crap!
> It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against pr0n, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers
I bet this is your main problem. Having experience with a site which has similar numbers (less in fact), I was surprised to know that you are able to generate only so much, as to cover hosting expense. And on that related note, which is another "top tier advertiser" network other than Google's?
The only other reason I can think of is you having a very high bounce rate, something above 90%?
Sorry, for being (inadvertently) blunt. But this is my area of some experience and also interest.
I don't understand if it has 6 million unique visitors a month, how can he not monetize this? This seems to be more about how the revenue via advertising has dried up. Can barely pay for the servers !?
6 million unique visitors a month are seeing nothing they can't see for free on Twitter. The problem of how to make money on aggregated content is an interesting one (and relevant to more than a few struggling entrepreneurs)
Spot on man! I gotta admit the website is meh (although what can I say, I've never published+hosted a website before) but that story is pretty amazing!
Maybe OP should try to publish an ebook on his 10 year adventure?
>captured something that so few of us can really relate to.
>Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding.
>"Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you."
Maybe not the ten years part, but I imagine that a decent number of people here can relate to this (i.e. working on a startup for awhile and having a love/hate relationship with it while it is not yet a financial success.)
The projects I've kept grinding on for the longest have been the ones with the worst odds of making me rich. There are many types of projects that are just too seductive and habit forming. "Just one more tweak" becomes an intellectual challenge or a hobby as much as about business.
Though ultimately I think those kinds of projects are also the ones that often lead people to massive success too, because a lot of projects that are eventually successful takes long enough to get there that you'd give up if they didn't have that seductive effect.
The problem, of course, is figuring out when enough is enough (though the absence of commercial success is not necessarily a good yardstick, if it's still fun)
Have you thought of doing in content ads when people search specific things? I.e. If I look up "party" maybe there's an alcohol ad or an ad for a local bar. I have so many ideas around this.
- Site could be improved a lot for mobile. If you get a lot of mobile traffic, which wouldn't surprise me, I'll bet it massively underperforms desktop traffic on site engagement and ad revenue.
- You need to A/B test your ad locations a lot more. The locations do not look particularly good to me, but then again this does depend a lot on how most people interact with your site (which likely isn't starting at the homepage).
- More ad networks isn't always better. Are these ad networks actually outperforming adsense? Are you banned from adsense?
Edit: Ignore these two below, thanks jim-greer. Twitter is in fact hosting the images!
- (ignore) You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth. I don't know how big of an expense your edgecast bill is, but I'll bet you could cut it down by a lot.
- (ignore) Additionally, fix the cache headers on your images (change them from max-age: 0 to cache forever -- they look immutable). This will immediately lower your edgecast bill by a little bit and really help performance.
Agreed with mobile optimization, I have over 35% mobile traffic and I am doing a terrible job of taking advantage of this. But I don't know the first thing about how to do this. I have done some research and experiments but honestly couldn't make sense of it.
Yes, I am banned from Adsense, and just about every top tier ad network. There is a certain amount of porn on Twicsy (maybe 10% of overall traffic, nothing earth shattering) that makes it unsavory to many advertisers. Despite aggressive filtering in place to stop serving top tier ads on anything that might possibly be objectionable, and removing 10's of millions of pictures, it seems like every top provider has blacklisted Twicsy.
Could you load the images from the urls into memory and try out open source code[0] that detects porn (I'm sure there's probably something better out there, but this was just a quick find on github)?
I'm not sure how helpful it might be (false positives and what not), but it could help give you more numbers to quantify whats going on?
If I knew that would probably make me even more sad!
My gut says I would probably at least triple revenue if I could serve Adsense. Which would be enough to pay myself a bad salary while I continue the fight.
Are you banned from Adsense just because of the porn pics/videos?
Or have you been banned for other reasons (e.g. not having your own content, making duplicate content from twitter, copyright issues, dmca, gambling, site quality or other) ?
But recently there was a large tanker crash near where I live. The truck had exploded, and there were lots of people killed and hurt.
I wanted to see some pictures, but one hour after the incident the story was not (yet) on the TV news. So I turned to twitter, and using the standard twitter search, I found a few ransoms photos of the incident.
What I needed was a better way to search twitter for photos, with a specific tag or time frame posting, and perhaps even a geographical filter too (since the incident was at a specific place).
I'm sure other people would find this useful, especially when large events unfold live (I.e boston bombings, plane crash etc etc)
Actually I just found this: http://nearbytweets.com/ - seems someone has already done it (for free). You can change the location to anywhere in the world (not just 'near' you)
I actually do this on Instagram. It's not so effective for breaking news stories but it can be fun at music festivals and other entertainment type events.
I agree this idea has potential, and I have thought about it, but I am a bad web developer, and an even worse app developer. I have been looking for a partner to possibly do it with a rev share and I have contacted numerous people, but no takers...
If you are interested, i can develop NATIVE android/ios mobile html/web based app (similar to phonegap with embedded socket server) based on Xamarin.Android/Xamarin.IOS for FREE (looking to publish a portfolio of case studies). If interested contact srid68 at gmail.
The ad placement is basically terrible. You should place fewer ads, but put them nearer the content and above the fold.
For example, get them out of the sidebar and make one banner in line with the content between the navigation and the pictures. Basically get rid of the rest.
Also, have you considered selling ads on BuySellAds.com? With that amount of traffic you should make decent money on a CPM or monthly basis.
I have very little ability to change the UI because I am a bad web developer and every change I make seems to make things worse. But thanks for the placement suggestion, maybe that is worth a try.
I contacted BuySellAds a while back and they passed on the opportunity. They said their target audience doesn't line up well with Twicsy. Or some crap like that :)
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 because you don't want spam.
I'm trying to be helpful here, not trying to be an a$$, and I understand that you're frustrated with your current situation with Twicsy and your generally long-challenging experiences making a mint with your startups.
However, take a deep breath and realise you've done 3 times what so many have failed to do even once. You've launched 3 products which have seen some manner of success, two raised rounds of financing, and the other has a good volume of traffic. Give yourself a bit of credit on the positive.
Now the negative.
It is said time and time again, execution is everything. You should know that. I just took a look at Twicsy, and honestly the design isn't that bad, but it could use a touch up. If you aren't good at 'web development', get somebody to help you. I'm sure you can find a local developer who would like to have twicsy on their portfolio, or spend a few bucks and get it done.
Secondly, make it easy for people to advertise on the site. If you are going through an ad network, you're not doing the work anyway or put up a contact form on the site, or even put your e-mail in your HN profile. You want to be a success, ABC/S/whatever. You're missing opportunities where people want to give you money, and if you're missing those opportunities, I assume you're also missing opportunities to sell.
The 'build it and the money will come rolling in' days are long gone. Nobody is an overnight success, particularly those that make it look easiest. If you want success, you'll have to work for it. Or else, you'll have to settle for telling everybody about your 'almost successes'.
As I said, I hope this isn't coming across poorly, as I'm truly trying to help you, this thread just made me make a bunch of assumptions about you, and if I'm right, hopefully it will help you or somebody else.
You've struck a nerve with me here, which is why my writing may have a tinge of hostility, but maybe a small crack of the whip will wake you up to your current opportunities and how you can seize them.
All the best.
A. I contacted that guy directly, the response was really for everyone else. All you need to do to contact me is send 2 emails, I was trying to be nice with the hoops comment. I don't consider that a big deal and it makes the spam manageable.
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.]
He could do something like the new Pinterest ads. You search for a pic on Twitter and inside the results is a picture with an ad with a relative theme.
Pinterest is so hot right now. Twicsy is so not hot right now. That makes a huge difference when it comes to launching products like that. They also have much better engagement.
You may be right about #1, that was to be my next attempt at monetization. Right now you can only do keyword searches on the past month, I was going to offer a service to let people search the full index for maybe $10/month. But I am now involved with another startup that is taking all my time and I am not sure when I will get the chance to try this.
I have talked to many people about #2 but was unable to figure out something compelling to sell.
Tried #3 with Peecho for about a week, not one sale!
If you want some cricisim, the website style might be turning people away. http://twicsy.com/ The colours, contrast, and various sizes/spacing of things are somewhat unsettling.
It's full of (crappy - sorry) ads that probably don't pay much. Perhaps less is more? I'm not really a Google advocate, but how about switching to text-based ads only and focusing more on showing the user real content instead of large, annoying banners?
This happened with me as well. After spending lots of money and time building a complex tech I failed miserably. So on a boring day I wrote some crappy android app. I published it and went to sleep. A week passed and I realized that the app was in first 10 for a particular section in India.
I put Admob ads and suddenly revenue started zooming. My app will not scale beyond a point. It is unfundable. It is really crappy technology (basically a static website put as a webview) but it gets hundreds of installs every day and touching "thank you emails" every day.
"Bonus - This is an easy way to include pictures you have uploaded to Twitter in an easy and automated fashion. Go to http://twicsy.com and type in your twitter username. You will see all of the pictures you have uploaded through twitter. Now scroll to the right and click on the 'RSS' button. Now you can use this automatically updated link of your tiwtter pictures."
RSS FEEDS
So... since people can use twicsy to find all pictures on a certain hashtag topic ( http://twicsy.com/?search=%23cinderella ) or from a certain user ( http://twicsy.com/u/onedirection ), they can include these in their own sites as RSS feeds, thus contributing to his overall server traffic, but perhaps not actual visitors.
BANDWIDTH
He does not actually seem to host (all/any?) pictures himself (i.e. little bandwidth), but wraps twimg.com files in his own RSS tags, adding links to his site.
TRAFFIC 2
By the way, his assertion of 6MM visits a month is reflected in the quantcast numbers:
Also, pretty interesting affinity sites and demographic (younger males, no kids, not wealthy, college educated, more than avg african american and hispanic visitors) with a strong affinity for O'Reilly Automotive (perhaps not very similar to the audience of this site, hence virtually unknown)
Geo findings of Alexa seem to agree with Alexa, though strangely enough, India is missing from the top countries. Quantcast claims only 56k unique cookies from India. Perhaps someone one is using his site and responsible for a lot of the Alexa 13.5% ?
If my theory of above average RSS traffic is right, only he can tell, think he could make more money if he inserted some adverts into his RSS feed. Not sure how well this would go over with Twitter, since he's not doing (most of?) the image hosting.
I also get the feeling something is amiss. The Alexa and Quantcast numbers are significantly out of whack (13.4% of all traffic from India, yet only 56k unique visitors) strikes me as odd. He may be spending a bunch of money on servers whilst others save money on using them as a tool.
On a personal level I find the design very unattractive and out-of-date, which may prevent the site from becoming much of a destination and could be linked to the 60+% bounce rate. If I were him I would figure out what competitors do ( like twitpic, which according to compete is an actual competitor: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/twicsy.com/ ) and take it from there.
Access to actual analytics could provide more ideas for money-making (or -saving).
And an amazingly long tail from there. So that is definitely part of the problem when it comes to monetization. There are 120 different countries that had more than 1000 visits in October.
-----------
I do not actually believe that rss produces a significant amount of traffic for Twicsy. I don't see any evidence in the stats it has much of an impact at all.
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 love to help you if I can.
I am. Like digging through analytics. Some people pay me for it (not a hint, just a fact).
I feel something is missing in this story...
Google has very few sites linking to yours (~35 pages, mostly garbage pages), reports a huge number of indexed pages, but actually shows very few. Why? Hummingbird update or something else?
A search for Twicsy links in twitter finds hardly anything, except the site name in combination with a link to http://po.st.
You have 30k followers on Twitter, quite a few but not humongous, so your top trend tweets won't generate major traffic. 24k on FB, but most status updates get little or no comments, likes or shares.
I see a bunch of twicsy-'hosted' images on pinterest and tumblr. Most PG-18 search terms on your site are blocked, but when I do a google image search or twitter search, quite a few, I'd say 1 in 20 are of an adult nature (which perhaps doesn't help in terms of getting advertisers).
Is the real reason for your success & traffic really... pr0n?
Edit: One of the reasons I ask this is the source of your traffic. Would visits to your site allow Indonesians to bypass their 1MM site pr0n filters?
"As you might imagine, this service pulls up a lot of slightly personal pics, such as couples being all cutesy together. Since you don’t know any of them, it’s slightly creepy. But hey, if they don’t want those seen, they shouldn’t be sharing them over Twitter in the first place."
I regularly review the most trafficked pics on Twicsy and my rough estimate is that about 10-15% of the traffic is porn. But it is hard to know exactly because there is such a long tail of activity. My theory for why the associated words are usually porn is that there is less of long tail of activity when it comes to porn searches than regular searches. It didn't use to be this way, I think that 2 years ago roughly half the traffic was porn and when I realized this I was quite disheartened. I started taking aggressive steps to remove it and mitigate it and traffic suffered for a while, and I thought that was the end of Twicsy. But it bounced back after a few months and kept slogging on...
I would bet the top search on google is something simple porn related like "sex" similar to Twicsy. But that doesn't mean google is a porn site that no one should advertise on.
I'm not blaming you in any way, nor do I have a moral issue with it. I suspect the percentage is higher though...
As you indicate advertisers have a major issue with it. The site being what it is, a search index of unfiltered twitter picture streams now hosted on your servers, you probably can't prevent it either… Severely impacts your ability to make money on it, unless you were willing to go over to the 'dark side' and get 'content-relevant' advertisers… (don't ask me how they make money, it's a mystery to me, I've never paid for it)
The problem with "going to the dark side" is that I would be serving porn ads to all the Justin Bieber and One Direction fans in the world as well as the porn hounds. That would just be plain wrong.
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.
How much money does Craigslist actually make, though? Also not every Bootstrap site has to look Boostrappy, people just almost never bother to change the colors at all.
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.
Craigslist makes somewhere in the range of $100-150 million a year, they charge $25-75 for job ads in major markets and $10 for broker-listed apartments in NYC.
I am unconvinced that traffic is all a site needs to be a real business. Sites like pinterest & snapchat convince us otherwise. And those business operate at a loss. Trying doing that as your side project...and you probably wont go very far unless you have VCs with some deep pockets...or publicity from sites like hacker news & tech crunch.
You should be making a lot more than you're making. With a few tweaks to your ad placement you should be making more than enough to live off of.
I only say this because your current ad placement is kind of annoying and intrusive (especially on the content detail pages), yet they seem to be placed in some of the worst places to actually generate clicks. Of course, I don't have specific data or testing from your site to back that theory up, but if your site follows the trends I've seen in other sites this is certainly the case.
Feel free to reach out to me at the email address in my HN profile and I'll help you get them placed right/help you test out placement to start generating some real revenue. 6 million uniques is nothing to turn your nose up at, and it should be enough for you to make a living off of quite easily.
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[ 6.9 ms ] story [ 480 ms ] threadAlthough for me, the bigger issue is finding what Twicsy offers that's worth paying for?
pretty much the whole Internet is built on the idea that if you can get metrics like his up, and get funded, you can figure out monetization with the help of your expert investors.
EDIT: Must be the traffic, but these days that's not (that) impressive if there's no revenue model around it. That said, I'd love 6 million users/month.
EDIT 2: downvotes? I guess funding = success still around here, huh?
EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing.
And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc?
Those are dramatically different user segments / values.
You've got a bit of a 31-flavors UX where I can do a lot, but as a result wonder if you could massively pare this down, improve focus, and discover monetization through understanding what people actually use it for.
Agreed, the UX/UI is terrible. One big problem is that I am a terrible web developer, I am really just a back end data guy that knows enough to be dangerous on the front end.
But that's part of the reason why I think it has much more potential. The site gets a ton of traffic despite its obvious flaws. If I had the funds to do a redesign and even execute well on the basics who knows what could happen?
My portfolio is at madebyargon.com
On a related note, I also do free designs for open source projects (eg. vlc, ack). So if your have an open source project that you think could benefit from design, feel free to get in touch with me.
Working on such project helps me not just get my name out there, but also lets me learn a lot more than I can in commercial projects, since I usually get more creative freedom when I'm contributing my time rather than being paid for it.
We got a huge amount of traffic via SEO, and lots of long tail traffic (e.g. we'd come up first for a huge number of zip codes). A big problem with our consumer site was atrocious bounce rates: Most people clicked through out of curiosity, looked around on that single page or maybe one more, and left never to be seen again, because we did a really poor job of hooking them unless they happened to be looking for classified ads matching that particular long tail term, which few were. We should in retrospect have treated those visits as someone watching an ad for our site, rather than as a conscious visit by a user of our site, because most of our traffic was from people who likely did not even realise what the site was about by the time they clicked back or closed the window.
A big part of the challenge for you as well, I think, is driving down bounce rates and challenging those users into other parts of the site and to repeat visits by helping them "get" what they can get out of the site other than 15 seconds of looking at that one image.
If I was you, I'd segment users hard on referrals vs. direct traffic and cookied vs. uncookied (assume first time visitors). First of all, are you earning any money on those first time referral users? If not, that gives you total freedom to experiment. But regardless, subject the first time referred users to an absolute battery of segmented tests (A/B or multivariate or whatever scheme you're comfortable you can analyze results from) with pretty much the sole purpose of figuring out how to get more of those users to visit more sticky pages. Especially if people are coming in from long tail searches, I think you'd be better focusing on turning them into users than "drive by" assaulting them with ads like it feels like the site currently is doing.
E.g. consider imgur. Consider users coming to imgur pages from Reddit (consider your specific traffic sources, and whether or not you can do anything "special" for them)- not only do they get an interface to navigate that in many cases are more convenient than continuing to browse the equivalent image reddits, but you can even go to imgur.com/r/someimagereddit (e.g. http://imgur.com/r/pics) and get all the pictures from that subreddit in one place. It's seductive. Then there's ability to comment. The image pages themselves are extremely clean. It's seductive.
While if I get to your site from Google search results (say by entering "twitter babes" and going to the image results - I tested, it gives a Twicsy result high up, in between the porn), I need to go below the fold to even realize that there are related pictures, and there are no "niceties" like being able to use cursor left/right to move through a "gallery", or space to enlarge the image, as on imgur.com (if there are on Twicsy, I didn't notice them). What is there is massively distracting ads.
Imgur is teasing people in when they hit it for the first time, making it very tempting to click one more image, while your site is pretty much bunching people in the face with ads, which makes it hard to even discover the potential.
1. It would increase engagement with users. I think they would finally understand how Twicsy could be an interesting daily destination because they could just focus on their topics of interest.
2. It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against porn, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers, and allow us to target said advertising more easily. For popular verticals we could do direct ad sales which would be >100x more lucrative than the crap we serve now.
3. I think it would facilitate media partnerships. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but I think that if number 1 holds true that we could land partners for popular verticals.
The problems are that I basically ran out of time and money to be able to execute on this. I need money for a complete redesign to shift the focus to the topical verticals, and I need more time to execute on the back end tech to fill these verticals (maybe 2 months). I didn't need a ton of money, but even in this "easy time to raise money" I was unable to find an investor. I think the biggest reason for this is that I don't have a well rounded team in place, so part of this year I spent looking for a partner to focus on the business side. I was hoping I would meet someone that saw the potential as I did and believed we were right on the verge of something big. But I never found that person.
On repeat visits, yes the number of people that visit us just once is quite high. 5.8 million of the past 7.6 million visits were just one-timers. But there were over 350k people that visited us 9 or more times last month. And there were over 35k people that visited us 201 or more times. So that gives me reason to believe there are some real Twicsy fans out there! And, as I repeatedly say, we are succeeding despite the glaring drawbacks and problems with the site. Imagine if it wasn't such a piece of crap!
I bet this is your main problem. Having experience with a site which has similar numbers (less in fact), I was surprised to know that you are able to generate only so much, as to cover hosting expense. And on that related note, which is another "top tier advertiser" network other than Google's?
The only other reason I can think of is you having a very high bounce rate, something above 90%?
Sorry, for being (inadvertently) blunt. But this is my area of some experience and also interest.
I'd be curious to see some information regarding the number of ad impressions/clicks too. The only ad on the homepage is way at the bottom (I think).
But this blog post was awesome, raw, and captured something that so few of us can really relate to.
Dude grinds for 10 years, keeps grinding, doesn't know where to go but will probably keep grinding.
"Twicsy, you son of a bitch. You frustrate me so. I love you, but oh how I hate to love you."
Shine on, buddy. Best of luck!
Maybe OP should try to publish an ebook on his 10 year adventure?
Kudos to the author, best wishes for the future!
Maybe not the ten years part, but I imagine that a decent number of people here can relate to this (i.e. working on a startup for awhile and having a love/hate relationship with it while it is not yet a financial success.)
4chan is only one month older. It's like we're cousins.
How many of those do you sell, anyway (if you don't mind me asking)?
But, I am happy to be considered your cuz, even if it's the one you always beat up and lock in the shed.
Though ultimately I think those kinds of projects are also the ones that often lead people to massive success too, because a lot of projects that are eventually successful takes long enough to get there that you'd give up if they didn't have that seductive effect.
The problem, of course, is figuring out when enough is enough (though the absence of commercial success is not necessarily a good yardstick, if it's still fun)
* Follow the 4chan's method. Add captcha to search and offer captcha bypass for $15~ per year
* Make iOS / Android app, sell it for $1.99~ (you can make it with HTML/Javascript via PhoneGap)
* Offer API for affordable price
and please change current website design, make it simple and cleaner (Twitter Bootstrap is nice for that job and it's easy to learn)
- Site could be improved a lot for mobile. If you get a lot of mobile traffic, which wouldn't surprise me, I'll bet it massively underperforms desktop traffic on site engagement and ad revenue.
- You need to A/B test your ad locations a lot more. The locations do not look particularly good to me, but then again this does depend a lot on how most people interact with your site (which likely isn't starting at the homepage).
- More ad networks isn't always better. Are these ad networks actually outperforming adsense? Are you banned from adsense?
Edit: Ignore these two below, thanks jim-greer. Twitter is in fact hosting the images!
- (ignore) You probably could compress the big images more to save bandwidth. I don't know how big of an expense your edgecast bill is, but I'll bet you could cut it down by a lot.
- (ignore) Additionally, fix the cache headers on your images (change them from max-age: 0 to cache forever -- they look immutable). This will immediately lower your edgecast bill by a little bit and really help performance.
He's not hosting the images, Twitter is.
Yes, I am banned from Adsense, and just about every top tier ad network. There is a certain amount of porn on Twicsy (maybe 10% of overall traffic, nothing earth shattering) that makes it unsavory to many advertisers. Despite aggressive filtering in place to stop serving top tier ads on anything that might possibly be objectionable, and removing 10's of millions of pictures, it seems like every top provider has blacklisted Twicsy.
I'm not sure how helpful it might be (false positives and what not), but it could help give you more numbers to quantify whats going on?
[0] https://github.com/FreebieStock/PHP-Image-Pornographic-Conte...
My gut says I would probably at least triple revenue if I could serve Adsense. Which would be enough to pay myself a bad salary while I continue the fight.
But recently there was a large tanker crash near where I live. The truck had exploded, and there were lots of people killed and hurt.
I wanted to see some pictures, but one hour after the incident the story was not (yet) on the TV news. So I turned to twitter, and using the standard twitter search, I found a few ransoms photos of the incident.
What I needed was a better way to search twitter for photos, with a specific tag or time frame posting, and perhaps even a geographical filter too (since the incident was at a specific place).
I'm sure other people would find this useful, especially when large events unfold live (I.e boston bombings, plane crash etc etc)
For example, get them out of the sidebar and make one banner in line with the content between the navigation and the pictures. Basically get rid of the rest.
Also, have you considered selling ads on BuySellAds.com? With that amount of traffic you should make decent money on a CPM or monthly basis.
I contacted BuySellAds a while back and they passed on the opportunity. They said their target audience doesn't line up well with Twicsy. Or some crap like that :)
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 because you don't want spam.
I'm trying to be helpful here, not trying to be an a$$, and I understand that you're frustrated with your current situation with Twicsy and your generally long-challenging experiences making a mint with your startups.
However, take a deep breath and realise you've done 3 times what so many have failed to do even once. You've launched 3 products which have seen some manner of success, two raised rounds of financing, and the other has a good volume of traffic. Give yourself a bit of credit on the positive.
Now the negative.
It is said time and time again, execution is everything. You should know that. I just took a look at Twicsy, and honestly the design isn't that bad, but it could use a touch up. If you aren't good at 'web development', get somebody to help you. I'm sure you can find a local developer who would like to have twicsy on their portfolio, or spend a few bucks and get it done.
Secondly, make it easy for people to advertise on the site. If you are going through an ad network, you're not doing the work anyway or put up a contact form on the site, or even put your e-mail in your HN profile. You want to be a success, ABC/S/whatever. You're missing opportunities where people want to give you money, and if you're missing those opportunities, I assume you're also missing opportunities to sell.
The 'build it and the money will come rolling in' days are long gone. Nobody is an overnight success, particularly those that make it look easiest. If you want success, you'll have to work for it. Or else, you'll have to settle for telling everybody about your 'almost successes'.
As I said, I hope this isn't coming across poorly, as I'm truly trying to help you, this thread just made me make a bunch of assumptions about you, and if I'm right, hopefully it will help you or somebody else.
You've struck a nerve with me here, which is why my writing may have a tinge of hostility, but maybe a small crack of the whip will wake you up to your current opportunities and how you can seize them. All the best.
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.]
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.
I have talked to many people about #2 but was unable to figure out something compelling to sell.
Tried #3 with Peecho for about a week, not one sale!
I put Admob ads and suddenly revenue started zooming. My app will not scale beyond a point. It is unfundable. It is really crappy technology (basically a static website put as a webview) but it gets hundreds of installs every day and touching "thank you emails" every day.
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 answer:
"Bonus - This is an easy way to include pictures you have uploaded to Twitter in an easy and automated fashion. Go to http://twicsy.com and type in your twitter username. You will see all of the pictures you have uploaded through twitter. Now scroll to the right and click on the 'RSS' button. Now you can use this automatically updated link of your tiwtter pictures."
RSS FEEDS
So... since people can use twicsy to find all pictures on a certain hashtag topic ( http://twicsy.com/?search=%23cinderella ) or from a certain user ( http://twicsy.com/u/onedirection ), they can include these in their own sites as RSS feeds, thus contributing to his overall server traffic, but perhaps not actual visitors.
BANDWIDTH
He does not actually seem to host (all/any?) pictures himself (i.e. little bandwidth), but wraps twimg.com files in his own RSS tags, adding links to his site.
TRAFFIC 2
By the way, his assertion of 6MM visits a month is reflected in the quantcast numbers:
https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!traffic
DEMOGRAPHIC
Also, pretty interesting affinity sites and demographic (younger males, no kids, not wealthy, college educated, more than avg african american and hispanic visitors) with a strong affinity for O'Reilly Automotive (perhaps not very similar to the audience of this site, hence virtually unknown)
https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!demo
GEO
Geo findings of Alexa seem to agree with Alexa, though strangely enough, India is missing from the top countries. Quantcast claims only 56k unique cookies from India. Perhaps someone one is using his site and responsible for a lot of the Alexa 13.5% ?
https://www.quantcast.com/twicsy.com#!geo
MONEY MONEY MONEY
If my theory of above average RSS traffic is right, only he can tell, think he could make more money if he inserted some adverts into his RSS feed. Not sure how well this would go over with Twitter, since he's not doing (most of?) the image hosting.
I also get the feeling something is amiss. The Alexa and Quantcast numbers are significantly out of whack (13.4% of all traffic from India, yet only 56k unique visitors) strikes me as odd. He may be spending a bunch of money on servers whilst others save money on using them as a tool.
On a personal level I find the design very unattractive and out-of-date, which may prevent the site from becoming much of a destination and could be linked to the 60+% bounce rate. If I were him I would figure out what competitors do ( like twitpic, which according to compete is an actual competitor: https://siteanalytics.compete.com/twicsy.com/ ) and take it from there.
Access to actual analytics could provide more ideas for money-making (or -saving).
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 problem when it comes to monetization. There are 120 different countries that had more than 1000 visits in October.
-----------
I do not actually believe that rss produces a significant amount of traffic for Twicsy. I don't see any evidence in the stats it has much of an impact at all.
I feel something is missing in this story...
Google has very few sites linking to yours (~35 pages, mostly garbage pages), reports a huge number of indexed pages, but actually shows very few. Why? Hummingbird update or something else?
A search for Twicsy links in twitter finds hardly anything, except the site name in combination with a link to http://po.st.
You have 30k followers on Twitter, quite a few but not humongous, so your top trend tweets won't generate major traffic. 24k on FB, but most status updates get little or no comments, likes or shares.
I see a bunch of twicsy-'hosted' images on pinterest and tumblr. Most PG-18 search terms on your site are blocked, but when I do a google image search or twitter search, quite a few, I'd say 1 in 20 are of an adult nature (which perhaps doesn't help in terms of getting advertisers).
Is the real reason for your success & traffic really... pr0n?
Edit: One of the reasons I ask this is the source of your traffic. Would visits to your site allow Indonesians to bypass their 1MM site pr0n filters?
The TechCrunch article in 2009 criticised the website for being creepy http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/twicsy-is-a-killer-and-kind...
"As you might imagine, this service pulls up a lot of slightly personal pics, such as couples being all cutesy together. Since you don’t know any of them, it’s slightly creepy. But hey, if they don’t want those seen, they shouldn’t be sharing them over Twitter in the first place."
I would bet the top search on google is something simple porn related like "sex" similar to Twicsy. But that doesn't mean google is a porn site that no one should advertise on.
As you indicate advertisers have a major issue with it. The site being what it is, a search index of unfiltered twitter picture streams now hosted on your servers, you probably can't prevent it either… Severely impacts your ability to make money on it, unless you were willing to go over to the 'dark side' and get 'content-relevant' advertisers… (don't ask me how they make money, it's a mystery to me, I've never paid for it)
The problem with "going to the dark side" is that I would be serving porn ads to all the Justin Bieber and One Direction fans in the world as well as the porn hounds. That would just be plain wrong.
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.
I only say this because your current ad placement is kind of annoying and intrusive (especially on the content detail pages), yet they seem to be placed in some of the worst places to actually generate clicks. Of course, I don't have specific data or testing from your site to back that theory up, but if your site follows the trends I've seen in other sites this is certainly the case.
Feel free to reach out to me at the email address in my HN profile and I'll help you get them placed right/help you test out placement to start generating some real revenue. 6 million uniques is nothing to turn your nose up at, and it should be enough for you to make a living off of quite easily.