
Closure - dmor
http://refer.ly
======
StuieK
Slightly confused. Here: <http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/zombie-
startups/> they had ~130k "active monthly users" yet in that post they say
they had ~15k? Not trying to be snarky, just curious what they are using to
define the two groups.

~~~
dmor
No problem, only about 5% of our active users are contributors (this is pretty
typical of user generated content sites as I understand it, although we always
tried to make it higher). The rest are readers/subscribers

~~~
StuieK
Makes sense, thanks!

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jcampbell1
1.2 Million page views, and $33k in revenue. That is a $30 CPM. Wow.

I wonder if they tried buying traffic for some of best performing articles.
Probably not cost effective, but not far off.

~~~
ronilan
462,291/372,195 = $1.24 => Spend Per Visitor

33,883/462,291 * 100 = 7.30% => Commission Rate

33,883/372,195 * 100 = 9.10c => Value of Incoming Click

33,883/3,356,379 * 100 = 1.00c => Value of Outgoing Click

Required middleman amplification ratio: 9.1 => Hard but workable.

33,883/10 = $3883 => Monthly income => Not workable.

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ashutosh2000
I don't understand why a sudden closure. They were successful and were giving
a tough competition to Amazon affiliates. Then why start an online magazine?
They were receiving a massive amount of traffic just because they could earn
better than Amazon affiliates. I might be wrong but were people writing
articles? I mean who wants to be a paid freelancer when they can earn better
thought a blog? Also, this Paid Freelance Contributor Program is kind of
weird. We already have that!!

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ashrust
I'm proud to be in a community this transparent. Best of luck with the next
one.

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orangethirty
Pay attention, _this_ is how you handle the public aspects of a pivot.

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Nilzor
I don't understand that sentence. What is a pivot?

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untothebreach
A pivot is when a company (usually a smaller company) decides that their
current business model/idea isn't working, and "pivots" to another idea.
Though to be fair, I arrived at this definition only by seeing it enough times
on HN and defining it via context.

~~~
alexey_a
The word originally came from Eric Ries and the Lean Startup (I think). Pivot
does indeed mean changing to another idea, though the emphasis is on "change
direction with one foot on the ground", ie, not just scrapping everything to
do something completely new. Though nowadays it seems pivot can mean
everything from "slight change in direction" to "completely give up".

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alaskamiller
Squidoo 2.0

Not that it's a good or bad thing. Just noting the similarities of two ideas
pushed through by two strong personalities--love you, mean it, dmor--that
approached the editorial process with a means of monetization.

I believe the trick, as Mahalo learned early, is that you need a lot of
traffic to draw from for this kind of model to ramp up and then work out a win
for everyone with their fingers in the pie.

For my own startup junkie datapoint would any Amazon engineer please dish
about lessons learned while productizing of, and the lack thereof, Amazon
wishlists or tangentially Amazon Vine?

With a massive database of products, reviews, actions, tastes,
recommendations, and traffic, that's a great nexus to apply a referral model
to.

~~~
dmor
No offense taken, we looked to learn from Squidoo a great deal and Seth sent
me a couple supportive notes along the way that meant a lot to me.

I still believe cost-per-action is the future of indirect revenue on the
Internet and as fraud continues to climb in display and even CPC advertising I
think things will head in this direction. But not yet.

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Tichy
It seems difficult to make good money with affiliate marketing. Example Amazon
books: say I earn 1$ per book sale - that is about the same as for 10 clicks
on an adwords ad on my site. If 10 people have clicked on an Amazon link, I
haven't earned anything yet. So how can such things make sense? I guess you
have to sell more expensive stuff, but I think Amazon has also capped the max
affiliate reward now?

A pity, because I'd prefer to refer handpicked things to unpredictable AdWords
on my site, but can't see it working.

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bkparikh
Absolutely love the transparency. It's nice for founders to know that everyone
else (even some of the best!) aren't always crushing it...but I'm betting
you'll crush it next time around :) Good luck!

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pron
This is a beautiful way to show everyone that you guys know what you're doing
and to build brand loyalty. Best of luck!

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nfm
Man, startups are hard. B2C startups are really hard. Best of luck with the
pivot!

