I originally started the site because, at the time, Guide to The Point was doing pretty well (that's going on six years, though I've neglected it for at least two years). I thought the Web needed a place where roller coaster geeks could go to find news about other sites, which was primarily where you got news at the time. The news tends to come more from traditional news sources, like newspapers online, but there's still plenty of news about the industry.
The site got hot pretty quickly, snagging thousands of visitors only in a couple of months. The format may have had something to do with that, but the bigger reason was that I spent a great deal on advertising at the time via GoTo.com (now Overture, which is Yahoo). The cost of "customer acquisition" at the time wasn't cheap, but with the ad market being generally good back then it was a slightly better than break-even proposition. Besides, that's when I sold the popworld.com domain for $100k to the Brits, so I could afford it.
CoasterBuzz has had a lot of ups and downs. At one point it got hard to pay for because it got so popular, and combined with the daily shit I took from people who didn't like the way I ran the site (just not going to the site apparently wasn't obvious enough of a solution), I was at several points ready to just close it up and do something else.
When the ad situation got really bad because I was dropped by DoubleClick as a publisher, I immediately made some phone calls to parks see if we could line-up an event or two and if they'd consider us a legit club. After about a week, CoasterBuzz Club was born late in 2001. The purpose was two-fold. The first was to pay the bills for the site, the second was to provide a low-cost alternative club.
Surprisingly enough, it worked and has lasted. We'll probably only do one event this year (parks aren't real friendly to enthusiast culture as of late), but it's going to be associated with The Beast's 25th anniversary, so I can't complain about that.
About the same time, and in part because of the phone calls, I got to be pretty tight with a lot of "important" people in the industry. I was surprised to find that theme park execs were visiting the site daily. Knowing those people doesn't have a ton of value really, except to say that I have such acquaintances, and I learn about stuff before it happens. Most people could care less, so it's just a private perk for me I guess. If there was some way to monetize it that'd be nice.
Expenses are finally under control because bandwidth and servers have become much cheaper and I don't need my own T-1 to host. The problem with the T-1 was that I never had enough money left over to pay-off all of the software and hardware I bought. I think this year by summer I should finally have that CitiBusiness card down to zero. At that point any extra money I can actually keep.
I'm wondering what I'll do at that point. I'm not going to buy cars or anything, but having actual income will be a nice change of pace. I'll finally be able to do the charity stuff again. I know some people in the community don't like the idea that I could make money from the site, but I'll never understand why it's so wrong to make a little money doing something you enjoy. If my sites collectively let me make a modest living, maybe I'd spend more time keeping them at their best.
CoasterBuzz will be the first site I rebuild using the forthcoming new version of ASP.NET. The forum that runs as the underlying membership engine to the site is now open source. I can't sell it anymore, so I figured I might as well let other people use the code for free.
I launched this site late last year, uber:ASP.Net a couple of weeks ago, and I've got something else up my sleeve as well. I've written so much automation software that it gets easier every site. If I can generate a comfortable $30k a year profit, I'll make these sites my full-time job (CoasterBuzz alone doesn't even get remotely close to half of that amount, unfortunately, because the audience is too small).
Above all, I keep up with CoasterBuzz because I still enjoy it. I've made some great friends there and the site itself is a great lab for trying out new things with regards to code. Not only that, but the dynamics of an online community are fascinating.
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