As we continue to build RMX Direct at Right Media, the situation comes up where we need to test new features or debug a problem using a site that is owned by an employee so that it’s not a real customer having to test for us.
Previously, we used to use a site known as Whoomp.com operated by myself, Cameron McNeeley, and Dave Barousse. It worked quite well, except that the site required the constant updating of content to keep up high enough traffic levels so that we could test effectively, and some ad networks require certain traffic levels to accept your site. We have jobs that we love as well as friends and family to be with so we didn’t have really have time to keep Whoomp.com going, so we sold the site.
One might suggest that we just create some quick test site, but many of our tests require steady traffic levels, users from many geographic regions, and that we have enough traffic to get accepted by most ad networks.
As it became more obvious we were in dire need of a legitimate site, the former Whoomp.com team huddled up to brainstorm and create a site that fulfilled the following requirements:
- We must be able to create the site in a night or two of work.
- The site must have user-generated content so that it runs itself.
- The site should have some viral element so that it can grow to a decent traffic level without us spending time marketing it.
- Due to the nature of a lot of our clients, having social features or some relation to social networks keeps us in the same area as many of our clients.
- It must be suitable to run advertising on and get accepted by ad networks.
Additionally, we decided it’d be great to “live blog” the launch and growth of the site so that we could educate our publishers and anyone else out there interested in starting a website with advertising as a revenue model. The focus will be on growing the advertising revenue, and how to work with RMX Direct to do so. We plan on sharing all our traffic and advertising revenue stats in the process. The proof is in the pudding right?
I also plan on blogging about any successful marketing tactics, interesting stories, or anything else that seems blog worthy related to it.
After 15 minutes much deliberation, we came up with VoFiles.com. VoFiles is a play on the Digg-style voting site, except changed to voting on social network profiles in different categories. Is it a unique and genius business model destined for huge success? No, but we hadn’t seen such a site for voting on profiles, and it satisfies all the criteria laid out above.
It was quick to build using the open source code from Pligg, word has already started to spread a bit and random people are adding content, and if it catches on in any of the social networks we should be able to generate enough traffic to make it a site we can test with.
Naturally, we can use any help you can give to get the ball rolling. If you’d like to link to VoFiles, submit profiles, vote on profiles, subscribe to the RSS feed, or provide any suggestions, you are welcome to do so.
Expect a post soon outlining our initial advertising setup and strategy.
Now, for our first of what will hopefully be weekly check-ins on VoFiles’ progress in growth and advertising. The following data is all for the previous week of when I report it:
NOVERMBER 26-DECEMBER 2nd
User Accounts: 10
Visits: 65
Page Views: 546
Ad Revenue: $0.32
Overall eCPM: $0.18
Google Page Rank: 0/10
Alexa Rank: 594,900
Alexa Graph:
RMX Direct Advertiser Report: (click to enlarge)
