

Ask HN/PG:  How long does it take a social news site to live on it's own? - iamelgringo

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.<p>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.<p>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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kyro
Well, posting this here will definitely generate a bit more traffic for you.

I'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.

~~~
stevenj
>I'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...

markenomics.com is an alternative to NM

~~~
awa
I wasn't part of NM, so don't know much about it, but markenomics definitely
needs a better comments/articles ratio before it takes off, so I think the
slot for a HN-economics is still open.

~~~
stevenj
With time

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sga
I'm curious what the monetization strategy is for these types of social news
sites (ex. Newsley, Rubyflow, markenomics, etc., etc.). Or is the motivation
to do the work to build this type of site (both structurally and in a
community sense) born out of strong interest in the subject and perhaps the
chance of potential indirect future rewards (networking, jobs, etc.).

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.

~~~
iamelgringo
One of the reasons that I picked up the financial/economic news topic was that
I did a study on adwords advertising. I bought a list of the top 50,000 paying
keywords on Google's Adsense program off of a shady looking site. I then wrote
a script to scrape the number of hits on Google for every keyword on the list,
and that gave me a ratio of high paying keywords to low hits on Google. The
data off the list looked pretty accurate when I spot checked it with my
adsense account.

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.

~~~
sga
Thanks for the insight into your method and thinking. I'll definitely consider
this if/when I make an attempt. Best of luck with Newsley.

~~~
iamelgringo
If you ping me, I'd be happy to send you the spreadsheet of the keywords. My
contact info is in my profile.

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emmett
Calling kn0thing, calling kn0thing...

~~~
kn0thing
Hi, everybody! (Hi, Doctor Nick)

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...

~~~
iamelgringo
Awesome information. I really appreciate it. That actually helps a lot. I'll
get working on the karma leader boards. The plumbing is all done, I just need
to wire it up to the front page. I don't know why I haven't done it before.

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.

~~~
kn0thing
My pleasure!

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>

~~~
iamelgringo
I've perused it a couple of times, and I've picked up some good ideas. It's
great that you guys have open sourced that code.

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petercooper
I launched RubyFlow - a public link blog for Ruby stuff - on April 9, 2008. On
the same day, 3 other people posted items. The next day, about 10 others. This
kept up for a few weeks but it died down a lot so I picked up the slack, did
more promo, and since late 2008 it's basically run itself.

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.

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awa
Clickable: <http://Newsley.com>

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manbearpig
Well according to Quantcast, this site now only gets 5.9K US visitors a month,
so you might not need even 5K to have a decent site. At its peak HN got around
17.4K.

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.

~~~
iamelgringo
re: Quantcast: PG said that this site was getting around 40k uniques a day a
few months back.

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.

