
How ThatHigh solved the chicken and egg problem and grew to 1 million pageviews - il
http://insight.io/blog/2011/02/how-thathigh-com-solved-the-chicken-and-egg-problem-and-grew-to-1-million-pageviews-a-month-with-no-seo/
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DanielBMarkham
This was a good article, all except for the last little bit:

 _Sometimes, driving traffic simply demands ingenuity, creativity, and hustle.
Be more creative than your competitors, work harder than them, and test faster
than them. Go where your competitors dare not because they are too complacent,
too conventional, too risk-averse. There are literally thousands of diverse
traffic sources out there…go explore them!_

Not trying to rag on the author, but the problem here, is that this is just a
_platitude_. It can mean anything. Therefore it really means nothing. Until
and unless specific examples are given, it's just saying that in order to be
better you need to be better.

All-in-all, though, it was a great article. My takeaway was that sticky sites
beat plain content sites, but only if you bust your ass getting people
participating, and there are no hard and fast rules for that. Do whatever it
takes. That's not necessarily a happy piece of information to have, but it's
direct and useful.

~~~
il
I agree.

But isn't it considered de rigeur to end a case study with a trite,
meaningless yet upbeat platitude? You know, "Here's how this guy is
successful, now go forth and be successful like him, because YOU CAN DO IT!"

In any case, I welcome any and all suggestions for an alternate ending.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I think it's probably a "designed" fault. (Hey, it's not a bug, it's a
feature!)

The problem, like you say, is that you have to wrap it up at the end. This
works as good as anything.

But for a novice, it can look as if the "wrapping up" part is where the real
summary goes, and that's not true at all. In fact, by summarizing, you miss
out on all the good stuff.

So perhaps you're stuck.

I'd like to see somebody talk to a dozen of these guys and ask them questions
along the lines of "so, when you realized that you were going to have to be a
sock puppet for the rest of your natural life, when and how did you finally
figure out to do X?" The dry-erase marking, for example. Great idea. But why
that and not door-hanging, or radio ads, or wearing a sandwich board on main
street? Why did they choose those particular ad-hoc things that finally made a
breakthrough?

I don't believe it's all random. Somebody had some hunches in there somewhere.
There are a million random things you can do to try to drive traffic. Somehow
some folks pick better things than others.

~~~
endlessvoid94
Your points are all valid.

I chose the white board markers because I wanted something that people would
remember. Students especially are subjected to so much spam every day in their
classes, dorms, lunchrooms, everywhere. The whiteboard idea was chosen because
of its efficiency: maybe $5 for the markers plus a few hours of work, in
exchange for people remembering what they've read? Worth it.

Someone even got pissed off. Any press is good press, when we're talking about
a site like this. A student was really pissed (rightfully so, most likely)
that we spammed his dorm. I'd probably be pissed too. But he remembered it,
and everybody he told instantly went to the website to see what all the fuss
was about.

I realize I'm just answering this one instance of the more general problem: we
need resources for why people choose these things, not merely what they chose
to do.

I think this is a really hard problem. Hunches are really difficult to
pinpoint.

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covercash
The owner did a pretty interesting AMA over on reddit about a month ago.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ev2zb/i_run_thathighco...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ev2zb/i_run_thathighcom_and_it_pays_my_rent_in_san/)

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bherms
This is great info for people looking to do sites in the chicken/egg
category.. I'm actually sitting here working on an idea that a friend and I
will be launching by Monday that will face many of these same problems and
it's awesome to hear from someone who has been successful facing the same
problems we envisioned having.

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jayzee
I am more curious to know how much traffic it takes for a site like this to
become profitable ads? Anybody has any details?

ps: I guess quite a few of us have such "Oh that would be a fun site" ideas...
I just don't know what traffic will make it worth the effort.

~~~
oldstrangers
From my experience, 500,000 pageviews a month will turn a decent profit.
Absolute minimum seems to be 100,000 a month, which is extremely easy to
obtain these days.

~~~
patrickaljord
How much can you make with 100,000?

~~~
iaskwhy
My numbers from January: 159k pageviews (137k with ads, one per page at the
bottom), $84 in Adsense.

~~~
maneesh
Hrm, my January numbers: Page Impressions, 12900; AdSense, $340

~~~
iaskwhy
Well, it's public how numbers vary so much. Mine's a niche music site so I
don't think I should expect much more than what it's doing right now. I could
easily improve the banners placement though, I just think it isn't worth it.

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devinfoley
I am familiar with the site because I saw it on Reddit. When I saw the
headline on HN, my initial thought was "Wow, those stoners actually figured
out which came first, the chicken or the egg!"

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Rariel
Very interesting. It's funny, I'm actually launching a site with the
chicken/egg problem and I thought of some of the same ideas (fake users or at
least having your friends create 2-3 accounts each and chalking up my campus
quad). I'm glad to hear that these ideas have resulted in lots of hits. I will
report back on my progress with chalking for those interested. I'm planning to
hit the 3 major universities in my area and I think this could have major
impact. We'll see!

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guynamedloren
@endlessvoid94 - Good work solving the chicken/egg problem. I noticed you're a
UIUC alum (couldn't help but make the connection between your mentionong of
chalking the quad in the article and the actual THATHIGH.COM chalk I saw
everywhere last year). I would love to hear your thoughts on entrepreneurship
in CU and what prompted you to move out west. Just sent you a tweet.

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rmc
They talk about how SEO wasn't important for them, which makes sense, since
very few of their target audience or current users are going to search for
"funny stories of people getting high" or similar.

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widgetycrank
That was a nice read, though I wonder if there are legal issues with mining
the web for content. For reddit they were just submitting links, so they
probably wouldn't have gotten into much trouble.

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kgtm
Fake it till you make it. Seed your community with users and content, appear
full of life. And they will come.

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baby
I've read a similar article which was on the frontpage of HN not so long ago.
And it was better. Why would you use ThatHigh as an example to illustrate this
? I think this site did poorly. And just looking at how much fan they have on
their facebook can pretty much prove my point (I got like 95k fans on my page
just by liking something with my facebook account. Never did anything else
than that to promote my website)

~~~
il
The traffic numbers are legit and not inflated, if that's what you're
wondering about.

Honestly, I don't know that many people who have built a community site of
similar traffic level that quickly, especially without doing any SEO.

If you can put me in touch with others who have accomplished something like
this, I would love to write about them too.

~~~
WalterGR
_Honestly, I don't know that many people who have built a community site of
similar traffic level that quickly_

Maybe I missed it, but did you mention the site's age anywhere in the article?

