April 15, 2008 at 06:44The experience of creating online media from Yuri Sinodov. Part 2
Continuation of the conversation with the creator of the resource roem.ru. It will be about:
- The main source of the audience of the resource was my LJ . For those six months (from the moment of leaving the Web planet to launch) the audience of its regular readers has increased from 100 to 350 people. Of course, this took time, but the fact that I was constantly writing something there eventually paid off, because all these people eventually switched to roem.ru.
In the early days, 300 people registered, now they are about 1200, active - about 800. Given that on the Web planet, the core in terms of Liveinternet is about 700 people, this is a good result. The core itself is 350 people.
The growth dynamics was unexpected, I don’t know why so ...
In general, an active audience flows and makes itself felt quickly enough. When Lekha Andreev and Masha Formanyuk went on vacation in August, and Lekha asked me to look after the Web planet, I decided - why not, despite my project. And quite quickly the number of comments increased, discussions started ... The most active audience appears quickly enough.
As for the sources of visitors, there were several successful affiliate programs:
- But in fact there are no more. There are very few resources with people working in the Internet industry. I strongly doubt that I will be able to agree on the exchange of content with existing resources, because this probably will not suit them - they will most likely lose their audience and gain little.
I try to keep in touch with programmer conferences such as RIT and Highload, because as soon as a person is interested in such events, he gets into the target audience. I consider it completely wrong to engage in newcomers (on the Internet), because such people, firstly, can quickly learn and leave, and secondly, there will be no viral spread, and then you will have to attract an audience. And it will be more expensive than selling it, because there is no portrait of such an audience.
If we talk about the same banners on rutube, then, if I placed them for money, most likely I would quickly refuse, because the click-through rate of banners is 0.2-0.5%. And in general, I consider the scheme with paid impressions to be correct only for media with expensive advertising, where you sell your audience to the advertiser more expensive. I still can’t sell all the impressions.
In addition, I have a thematic audience, and when buying banners to track their thematic is impossible. On the page where my user is switching from advertising, it is written: what kind of site it is, what opportunities it has. There are no banners on it, so that advertisers do not think that their impressions are driving.
When you come to the advertiser and announce the thematic audience (exactly the one you need) - it works, then you can say a high price ...
- Do the advertisers take their word or check?
- They believe in the word.
- And why not cheat?
- Firstly, the statistics are open, and it can always be checked. Secondly, there is no special need for money now, and I want to avoid unnecessary problems in the future. Such as the Look, which is constantly blamed for the purchased traffic. I myself wrote on the Web planet that buying traffic is not bad, but as the owner of the resource I’ll run around and prove that I’m not a camel (that the purchased traffic is of normal quality), I don’t want (that is, it’s better not to buy it at all).
- By the way, there were discussions about the purchased traffic on Roy, that if people follow the headings, it means they are thematic users.
- There’s such a thing here that if you look at TNS Gallup reports, then the audience profile on different resources differs very slightly. But if managers are most interested in advertisers, and if they have 10% on one resource and 20% on the other, then it is believed that advertising on the second should be 2 times more expensive. How then does it turn out that there are only 1.1 times more managers, and advertising is 3 times more expensive?
Firstly, the fact is that on all Internet resources the majority of the audience are random visitors who will not go to the resource again. And secondly, the main thing is not the profile of the audience as a whole, but the profile of the core, which no one considers (here’s the idea for a startup to create a counter for the socio-demographic indicators of regular visitors - approx. P.N.). For access to opinion leaders (decision-makers), advertisers are willing to pay. A mistake in the Vedomosti newsletter showed what kind of audience it really is - it turned out that there are a lot of managers, and quite large ones.
Our audience consists of people working in Internet companies, and there are 100 of them. Now we are gaining 25,000 in a month, and when there are 100,000, there will be nowhere else to grow.
- Is there any understanding of how to come from 25 to 100 thousand?
- How? It’s necessary to work :)
I don’t like talking about plans, because they tend to change. There was an idea to create a freelance exchange, but then I looked at the existing resources, their audience, the complexity of the development ... and realized that it would not be worth it.
- Did you count on the cost of visitors?
- No, and besides, they all got it for free :) Well, except for the same banner. In addition, it is impossible to calculate the conversion of visitors from offline media to online, for what reason today you have increased attendance and due to what kind of promotion efforts. - And why did it happen that prominent figures of the Runet are noted on roem.ru, who are not on other resources? If Igor Ashmanovyou can see a lot somewhere, then Pavel Durov - hardly anywhere else.
- Yes! Frankly, I did not expect to see Durov ... He seemed to me a fairly closed person. Nevertheless, we are having some discussions with us ...
I think the decisivethingwas the rejection of user ratings so that the situation would not happen when an authoritative user of the site (but a pioneer on the Internet) indicates authority on the Internet (but a pioneer on the site). We also highlight the comments of the newsmakers, put them up. As a result, an atmosphere was created that we listen to the opinions of influential people, no one will offend and trample them in the mud.
True, sometimes you have to call and separately ask permission to raise a comment if a person has not done this on his own: you never know, maybe this is not an official position. This is a little embarrassing, it is necessary to somehow solve this problem ... but so far it is not clear how.
Design is also not crucial for the success of the project - if you put everything in bare HTML, as on compromat.ru, then there will be the same attendance (apparently, because of the roem.ru design and does not shine :) - approx. PN)
Bitrix was taken as the engine, because translations of foreign versions are always lame. And with Bitrix it turned out quite simply - I came, asked and received the engine for free use.
We started with a monstrous bug, which is strange, as you might not have noticed: when you click on "read more", a person gets to the main news page. So many messages fell over my head in ICQ in the first days that I closed many windows without reading. We are still raking the identified shortcomings - and this is normal for such a resource. Actually, when I started, I counted on tolerance to bugs, because the audience itself understands that this is inevitable when starting a project.
The only thing that bothered me was the privacy of the data. Even I can’t find out who left comments under the nickname Alter Ego. And such tactics paid off after a couple of months, when they came up with questions from one power structure, and who wrote this and that, but I couldn’t show them anything except the document from the hoster that the logs are stored for 3 hours. And 3 hours is just such a safe period when no one has time to react to anything.
- In fact, all the time. - And how much? A couple of hours, the whole working day? ..
- In fact, the time for writing a note (together with proofreading and publication) is half an hour, that is, theoretically, it would be possible to write 16 materials per day. But I write less because I focus on quality (but I still think that I write high-quality materials). And besides, there is not always something to write about.
This is now the main problem - to maintain the achieved level. If we did not have unique materials, then the audience would be the same as on Telnews, which suffers from their absence, and on which there are no comments.
Monitoring all the places where there is interesting news can take more than a day - that is, you simply can’t keep track of all the news. And this is a problem that bothers me, because there are few people who can determine which news is suitable and which is not. I wanted to hire a person, but it seems that he will be able to remove from me only the task of writing material on a given topic (and not ask it yourself).
“And the same web planetary guys, and people like them, won't do?”
- Webplanet’s concept is based on another: the news is based on some fact that is played out, quoted, the background is added - and that’s it. And I want better, but there are already few of them. I am interested in people with brains who understand not only in the Internet business, but also at the everyday level. But such people do not stay in journalism for a long time and flow into more profitable industries.
I now also offer to quit roem and go, but I answer with the phrase of Comrade Sukhov - better still torment. Because the information that they are telling me right now, I would hardly have known as an employee of a competing company. And since I have not been seen in uncontrolled plums, they trust me. I see this as a good school, and my value during the work on the project has seriously increased, and from this point of view, engaging in roem.ru will never be unprofitable.
I think that the problem that we started talking about will come down to the fact that I will not leave anyone with roem.ru. Just as it happened with the Web planet - when Denis Kryuchkov left, she began to sausage. I wouldn’t like that.
- It turns out that this is not a business, because it is impossible to sell it.
- Yes, in my opinion, this is work. And how can you sell a job? If you sell the resource now, it turns out that I’ll just exchange the share for the salary, but I would not want to, because there are several ideas for developing services. I have a serious calculation for this, because it is already easier to sell them. Therefore, I am pleased with the increase in attendance of non-news sections. When their attendance is about 50 times greater than the news, there will be no problems with the sale. Now they are only 2.5 times more popular, and it was 1.5 times more popular.
People working in the Internet industry are able to correctly focus their attention, although maybe they do not know how to write - however, I do not know how to write either. And if you put a replaceable editor on them, then it will already be a full-fledged service.
- What do you think, how much longer will increase this ratio?
- I expect to engage in Roy for another 1.5-2 years. And those same 100,000 visitors can be expected in 3 years, when the CIS countries develop.
Prepared by Pavel Nosikov
- attracting visitors to the resource (end),
- driving traffic in general,
- prospects of Roy as a business and Yuri as its creator
- features of the technical and content part of the project.
- The main source of the audience of the resource was my LJ . For those six months (from the moment of leaving the Web planet to launch) the audience of its regular readers has increased from 100 to 350 people. Of course, this took time, but the fact that I was constantly writing something there eventually paid off, because all these people eventually switched to roem.ru.
In the early days, 300 people registered, now they are about 1200, active - about 800. Given that on the Web planet, the core in terms of Liveinternet is about 700 people, this is a good result. The core itself is 350 people.
The growth dynamics was unexpected, I don’t know why so ...
In general, an active audience flows and makes itself felt quickly enough. When Lekha Andreev and Masha Formanyuk went on vacation in August, and Lekha asked me to look after the Web planet, I decided - why not, despite my project. And quite quickly the number of comments increased, discussions started ... The most active audience appears quickly enough.
As for the sources of visitors, there were several successful affiliate programs:
- banner advertising at conferences. For Highload (probably I mean ClientSide after all, because Highload passed even before the opening of roem.ru - approx. PN) the banner was ordered by Rogozhin himself (the organizer of the conference), as a result an interesting situation was obtained when he ordered it himself the 2 * 3 banner turned out to be the largest at the event, then people gathered next to it, took pictures ... The advertisement was also at the Ashman conference, before it I specially made several publications on search engine optimization so that people would come and see that the resource was for them.
- advertising on rutube . Their contribution was quite significant, they accounted for 25-33% of transitions.
- But in fact there are no more. There are very few resources with people working in the Internet industry. I strongly doubt that I will be able to agree on the exchange of content with existing resources, because this probably will not suit them - they will most likely lose their audience and gain little.
I try to keep in touch with programmer conferences such as RIT and Highload, because as soon as a person is interested in such events, he gets into the target audience. I consider it completely wrong to engage in newcomers (on the Internet), because such people, firstly, can quickly learn and leave, and secondly, there will be no viral spread, and then you will have to attract an audience. And it will be more expensive than selling it, because there is no portrait of such an audience.
If we talk about the same banners on rutube, then, if I placed them for money, most likely I would quickly refuse, because the click-through rate of banners is 0.2-0.5%. And in general, I consider the scheme with paid impressions to be correct only for media with expensive advertising, where you sell your audience to the advertiser more expensive. I still can’t sell all the impressions.
In addition, I have a thematic audience, and when buying banners to track their thematic is impossible. On the page where my user is switching from advertising, it is written: what kind of site it is, what opportunities it has. There are no banners on it, so that advertisers do not think that their impressions are driving.
When you come to the advertiser and announce the thematic audience (exactly the one you need) - it works, then you can say a high price ...
- Do the advertisers take their word or check?
- They believe in the word.
- And why not cheat?
- Firstly, the statistics are open, and it can always be checked. Secondly, there is no special need for money now, and I want to avoid unnecessary problems in the future. Such as the Look, which is constantly blamed for the purchased traffic. I myself wrote on the Web planet that buying traffic is not bad, but as the owner of the resource I’ll run around and prove that I’m not a camel (that the purchased traffic is of normal quality), I don’t want (that is, it’s better not to buy it at all).
- By the way, there were discussions about the purchased traffic on Roy, that if people follow the headings, it means they are thematic users.
- There’s such a thing here that if you look at TNS Gallup reports, then the audience profile on different resources differs very slightly. But if managers are most interested in advertisers, and if they have 10% on one resource and 20% on the other, then it is believed that advertising on the second should be 2 times more expensive. How then does it turn out that there are only 1.1 times more managers, and advertising is 3 times more expensive?
Firstly, the fact is that on all Internet resources the majority of the audience are random visitors who will not go to the resource again. And secondly, the main thing is not the profile of the audience as a whole, but the profile of the core, which no one considers (here’s the idea for a startup to create a counter for the socio-demographic indicators of regular visitors - approx. P.N.). For access to opinion leaders (decision-makers), advertisers are willing to pay. A mistake in the Vedomosti newsletter showed what kind of audience it really is - it turned out that there are a lot of managers, and quite large ones.
Our audience consists of people working in Internet companies, and there are 100 of them. Now we are gaining 25,000 in a month, and when there are 100,000, there will be nowhere else to grow.
- Is there any understanding of how to come from 25 to 100 thousand?
- How? It’s necessary to work :)
I don’t like talking about plans, because they tend to change. There was an idea to create a freelance exchange, but then I looked at the existing resources, their audience, the complexity of the development ... and realized that it would not be worth it.
- Did you count on the cost of visitors?
- No, and besides, they all got it for free :) Well, except for the same banner. In addition, it is impossible to calculate the conversion of visitors from offline media to online, for what reason today you have increased attendance and due to what kind of promotion efforts. - And why did it happen that prominent figures of the Runet are noted on roem.ru, who are not on other resources? If Igor Ashmanovyou can see a lot somewhere, then Pavel Durov - hardly anywhere else.
- Yes! Frankly, I did not expect to see Durov ... He seemed to me a fairly closed person. Nevertheless, we are having some discussions with us ...
I think the decisivethingwas the rejection of user ratings so that the situation would not happen when an authoritative user of the site (but a pioneer on the Internet) indicates authority on the Internet (but a pioneer on the site). We also highlight the comments of the newsmakers, put them up. As a result, an atmosphere was created that we listen to the opinions of influential people, no one will offend and trample them in the mud.
True, sometimes you have to call and separately ask permission to raise a comment if a person has not done this on his own: you never know, maybe this is not an official position. This is a little embarrassing, it is necessary to somehow solve this problem ... but so far it is not clear how.
The siloviki left with nothing
- The technical part is the simplest in the project. The same Habrahabr can be done in a few weeks, which confirms the appearance of its clone resources (I will not argue with Yuri that roem.ru is a simple project. But I do not agree that the appearance of clone projects shows just that. In my opinion the experience of creating the first project is always more costly than all subsequent ones, because all the difficulties have already been solved and a common core has been developed Clone projects are just content, the first project is content + engine, and when the content is largely taken from users, the development of the engine - the determining stage in general for development work - note P.N.)Design is also not crucial for the success of the project - if you put everything in bare HTML, as on compromat.ru, then there will be the same attendance (apparently, because of the roem.ru design and does not shine :) - approx. PN)
Bitrix was taken as the engine, because translations of foreign versions are always lame. And with Bitrix it turned out quite simply - I came, asked and received the engine for free use.
We started with a monstrous bug, which is strange, as you might not have noticed: when you click on "read more", a person gets to the main news page. So many messages fell over my head in ICQ in the first days that I closed many windows without reading. We are still raking the identified shortcomings - and this is normal for such a resource. Actually, when I started, I counted on tolerance to bugs, because the audience itself understands that this is inevitable when starting a project.
The only thing that bothered me was the privacy of the data. Even I can’t find out who left comments under the nickname Alter Ego. And such tactics paid off after a couple of months, when they came up with questions from one power structure, and who wrote this and that, but I couldn’t show them anything except the document from the hoster that the logs are stored for 3 hours. And 3 hours is just such a safe period when no one has time to react to anything.
Roem.ru is work, not business
- How much time is now spent on the project?- In fact, all the time. - And how much? A couple of hours, the whole working day? ..
- In fact, the time for writing a note (together with proofreading and publication) is half an hour, that is, theoretically, it would be possible to write 16 materials per day. But I write less because I focus on quality (but I still think that I write high-quality materials). And besides, there is not always something to write about.
This is now the main problem - to maintain the achieved level. If we did not have unique materials, then the audience would be the same as on Telnews, which suffers from their absence, and on which there are no comments.
Monitoring all the places where there is interesting news can take more than a day - that is, you simply can’t keep track of all the news. And this is a problem that bothers me, because there are few people who can determine which news is suitable and which is not. I wanted to hire a person, but it seems that he will be able to remove from me only the task of writing material on a given topic (and not ask it yourself).
“And the same web planetary guys, and people like them, won't do?”
- Webplanet’s concept is based on another: the news is based on some fact that is played out, quoted, the background is added - and that’s it. And I want better, but there are already few of them. I am interested in people with brains who understand not only in the Internet business, but also at the everyday level. But such people do not stay in journalism for a long time and flow into more profitable industries.
I now also offer to quit roem and go, but I answer with the phrase of Comrade Sukhov - better still torment. Because the information that they are telling me right now, I would hardly have known as an employee of a competing company. And since I have not been seen in uncontrolled plums, they trust me. I see this as a good school, and my value during the work on the project has seriously increased, and from this point of view, engaging in roem.ru will never be unprofitable.
I think that the problem that we started talking about will come down to the fact that I will not leave anyone with roem.ru. Just as it happened with the Web planet - when Denis Kryuchkov left, she began to sausage. I wouldn’t like that.
- It turns out that this is not a business, because it is impossible to sell it.
- Yes, in my opinion, this is work. And how can you sell a job? If you sell the resource now, it turns out that I’ll just exchange the share for the salary, but I would not want to, because there are several ideas for developing services. I have a serious calculation for this, because it is already easier to sell them. Therefore, I am pleased with the increase in attendance of non-news sections. When their attendance is about 50 times greater than the news, there will be no problems with the sale. Now they are only 2.5 times more popular, and it was 1.5 times more popular.
People working in the Internet industry are able to correctly focus their attention, although maybe they do not know how to write - however, I do not know how to write either. And if you put a replaceable editor on them, then it will already be a full-fledged service.
- What do you think, how much longer will increase this ratio?
- I expect to engage in Roy for another 1.5-2 years. And those same 100,000 visitors can be expected in 3 years, when the CIS countries develop.
Prepared by Pavel Nosikov