I'm not making the kind of progress on the book that I hoped for this week. I find myself daydreaming about what I want the current chapter to say, but I have yet to get it on paper. I'm easily distracted.
I got some feedback about it from my contact at Microsoft, who thinks it's a fabulous idea, and he put me in touch with a few other people for further direction. Also got the down low on product cycles and development, with approximate ranges for release dates, which also helps immensely. (Obviously I can't say what they are, since it's all under NDA.) I have a pretty good feeling about it all, so I really need to execute.
I have found myself thinking more critically about CoasterBuzz lately, since it's obviously what's paying the mortgage right now. The ad network that had been doing pretty well is down about 60% for the same month last year, which is pretty dramatic and very disappointing. Thank God for Federated Media, which is kicking ass and taking names.
I've been trying to make tweaks to the site that cause it to make more money. In the old days you could just put more ads up, but not anymore. That also tends to annoy people, which I'd rather not do. Ultimately, people want solid content, so that's what you have to give them. I've been very lucky to see a steady increase in solid discussion, which has a high read rate. I'm glad to see quality and thoughtful people participating more.
Looking over my stats, I realized that few people ever looked at photos on the site. Tuesday night I elevated a random photo tease to the home page. That caused a 20% boost in page views per visit! Such a small tweak, with dramatic results. Photo pages only have the main banner ad, so they don't make a ton of money, but they do engage people, which is certainly what I'm after.
I've said before that I would rather have a thousand paying members than ten thousand regular visitors, in part because the ad revenue is so hard to predict. Not only that, but people who pay money tend to be a lot more in to what they've bought. I realized shortly after re-launching the site last fall that it was simple enough to simply ask people to join now and then. I've found that about 5% of the time, they accept the offer. That's pretty amazing.
I have to say that it's so much easier to really think about this stuff these days, thanks to Google. At this point they do analytics, ad serving, e-mail and Webmaster tools to see how you're really living in their search engine. The analytics in particular are so ridiculously useful. It's funny how various "tools" like Alexa aren't even close to real stats, but back in the day, it was the best we could do.
Once this book is done, I need to build something new, preferably one of the projects all ready in motion (right, Walt?). The coaster thing is still a finite audience and I doubt I can squeeze much more out of it in terms of growth.
I disagree about not seeing roller coaster growth. I tent to agree with Cedar Fair that with tough times the wallet will stay closer to home (aka. local amusement parks instead of Disney, Mexico, Europe, cruises, ect.). And with that I think we will see an interest level in amusement parks and roller coaster that we haven't seen in a while. Remember all of those little fan sites that did updates almost every day (the ones you talk about all the time)? I honestly think we could see that again. Just look at all of the interest in Diamondback at Kings Island. Yes Kings Island had needed that for years and yes this is an off year with few big coasters being added. But there has been a rebirth of excitement around one coaster that, though not as much as Millennium Force in 00(I'm guessing about that one, you'd have to fill me in on that), has people counting down the seconds till there visit to Kings Island.
It doesn't matter if people are going to get more into coasters again, because specific to the Internet, people are using it differently than they were ten years ago. The rise of Facebook makes that obvious. The niche is still finite and too small for there to be a solid opportunity.
You probably don't want to hear from me but I can honestly say the only reason I don't visit Buzz as much as I did this time last year is because there are no previews of popular topics on the front page and I'm too lazy to go to the forums to read much anymore. I'll also to on record as saying I'm not the only nonposter that stopped browsing when the popular topics left the front page.