Archives For Web 2.0

Inquisitr comes in at 7th on Australian Startup Index

January 15, 2009 — 9 Comments

TechNation Australia ?Ǭª Blog Archive ?Ǭª Australian Startup Index - Jan 09

The definition is probably a little fluid, but we get included with sites that may be arguably less deserving. Very nice though. The full index here.

BTW, anyone know what’s happening with the top 100 Australian blogs index? Meg hasn’t updated since November. I in part understand why: manually calculating the totals must be a complete bitch, but Meg has just completely stopped blogging as well.

One commitment though: if she isn’t back soon, I’ll give it a shot. Probably need half a day to do it, but it’s an index I value.

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Microsoft Fail

January 12, 2009 — 8 Comments

Twitter / Nick Hodge: @duncanriley anyway, writi ...

Microsoft Australia’s Nick Hodge doesn’t like that I highlighted in a post Microsoft’s failure with the Windows 7 beta launch.

I don’t know what else to call it though. Lets see: Microsoft says you’ve got a day to download 2.5m copies of a 3gb program, and the servers crash.

That’s a fail.

The problem going forward is one of economics. I understand from a PR perspective why Microsoft has now opened it up for 2 weeks with no cap on downloads (it’s a smart move PR wise), but the net result is possibly tens of millions of people with Win 7.

Oh, but it’s a time release, and expires August 1 is the response.

So what.

The sort of people downloading Win 7 are going to just as easily crack the time code when in the coming days someone releases a crack, and in effect Microsoft has just basically supplied the next generation of unauthorized copies of Windows. I’d say pirated, but lets see….they were given the copies by Microsoft itself.

Will some go out and buy the real thing later? maybe, but I’m betting it’s not a majority. Word of mouth may come into play, although the Win 7 reviews are mixed so far; some love it, some pointing out it’s just Vista with some interface improvements.

Microsoft has an opportunity to convert people back, and what better way than giving it to them. Better still, open source it, and then charge for support/ upgrades/ patches etc.

Millions of people are interested in Win 7, how much better would it be if Microsoft tapped into that community to make the product even better.

The gates open.

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Best post on why StumbleUpon is better than Digg for ads you’ll read

January 8, 2009 — 4 Comments

Muhammad Saleem, the smartest guy I know when it comes to social media/ voting sites pops up on Mashable to talk how StumbleUpon rocks vs Digg on advertising.

Read here.

Side note: he’ll never be invited back to post on TechCrunch now he’s appeared there 😉

Seriously though, we ran StumbleUpon advertising through the first 4 odd months of The Inquisitr. I only really stopped it when we really took off, but I can’t recommend it highly enough. Best ad buy you can spend. Contextual down to age group, area and interest. We use to spend $200 at a time, sometimes depending on the campaign it would last days, other times weeks. We always got a boost from each campaign ahead of what we invested. It may only deliver X amount per your spend, but an up vote or even exposure is worth more again in my experience.

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Traffic Splits at The Inquisitr

December 27, 2008 — 4 Comments

Interesting that people perceive The Inquisitr for its celebrity content. Scoble mentioned it on FriendFeed, but I know it’s a common perception.

Let me say that I really don’t have a lot of issues with the perception. We love our mix, I love not having to write wall to wall serious tech posts every day, and more importantly, its working. We’ll go just shy of 2m page views this month, and we need 320k in the last four days of the month to do it.

As I noted on another FriendFeed thread recently, we’re becoming more like a newspaper site. The only thing really holding us back expanding into more spaces (and we have a list of spaces we’d like to enter) is money…which is essentially people and time.

Here’s the traffic split I provided to someone recently

The split based on the top 100 posts month to today (as at Dec 18)

Odd/ Funny 62% Celeb 11%, General News 11%, Tech 8%, TV 3% Media 2% Other 2%

Excluding the top 3 posts (which were all 50k and above)

51% odd/ funny, Celeb 14%, news 13%, Tech 11%, TV 5%, media 3% other 3%

Estimate for all traffic:

40% odd/ funny, Celeb 10%, news 5%, Tech 25%, TV 5%, media 10% other 5%.

We get much better long tail traffic month to month on tech + media, and there is 2-3x more posts in tech than in other categories. News is usually only topical to time, and celeb stuff usually doesn’t wag the tail much either.

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Even at Christmas, Digg still sucks

December 26, 2008 — Leave a comment

Search for inquisitr.com

The good news going into Christmas for me was strong traffic for The Inquisitr at a time I honestly worried that we might drop right off. Christmas Eve (US time, so my Christmas Day) delivered us our 4th best day for December, and our best day since December 11.

We’ve never had any luck with Digg with the site. I’ve had some interesting conversations with people this year about other sites who rely on Digg; one person noted of another site when I noticed they’d be dropping traffic “they’re weening themselves off Digg.” I never say no to traffic, so it would be nice to have front pages on Digg, but we’ve grown without the support of Digg, except for Day 3 when we hit our only front page. Notably this isn’t the case with a number of other social voting sites who have been far more kind to us over the last nearly 8 months.

After Christmas lunch I glanced briefly at our stats, and I started seeing traffic from Digg. Not huge amounts, but more than we’d usually ever get. My first reaction: OMG, a Christmas present from Digg.

I looked for the post, and found it to be 4th in upcoming by number of Diggs. I couldn’t watch it closely, but the traffic kept coming in from it; in total we did just short of 700 page views from the mention. At about 6pm my time the post was the absolute top of upcoming by votes and sitting pretty for a front page. 11pm PDT Christmas Eve….so I’m thinking lovely, we might have a Digg spike dead on Christmas.

Then it completely disappeared, despite only showing 16 hours old at the time from submission.

It got buried.

This despite posts with half the number of votes hitting the front page before it.

I don’t know if the Digg algo unfairly marks us down, or what the story is, but what could have been, and perhaps should have been, wasn’t.

Even at Christmas, Digg still sucks.

There is a reason I spend most of my social voting time on Reddit. This just confirms it.

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On servers and MediaTemple

December 11, 2008 — 16 Comments

I had to bite the bullet today and upgrade from MediaTemple’s Dedicated virtual Extreme to a proper dedicated box for The Inquisitr. It may sound strange that we even started on a DV but the MT specs are the equivalent of a basic server anyway, and actually better than a few dedicated boxes I’ve had over the years. I also loved being in the cloud, and one thing I’ll say for it: it never crashed. Sure, we’d have the occasional heavy load, but even under complete stress, the DV server never once failed, and that wouldn’t have ever been the case with a dedicated box.

So now we’re going to the Nitro. $750/ mth US. Expensive when you’re going from $150 US a month, but it’s a gamble.

It’s a gamble in terms of traffic. We’ve had 3 days now of slow server due to traffic, and we got a front page on Fark this morning AND a link from CollegeHumor and the site shit itself in unprecedented fashion. The server never died, but DB errors, site not load etc etc. Not MT’s fault, simply a volume of traffic vs resources issue.

I didn’t want to upgrade yet, and on our usual daily load what we had was fine (which these days is 30-60k page views a day), but the issue then becomes one that if we do 100 or 200k days (yesterday was 197k) we’re actually losing more traffic due to slow provision or no provision at all. It’s an investment in future growth and to best cater for our peaks.

One thing I did want to say about MediaTemple: just brilliant. No migration on this end: I get the same IP, same control panel, same everything except greatly improved resources. Better still: the server will be on for us in 2-6 hours MAX. I know of no company that can provision servers so quickly. Brilliant, and I can’t speak highly enough of them…well, presuming everything goes smoothly with the upgrade 🙂

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The Inquisitr November

December 2, 2008 — 5 Comments

Pageviews: 1,085,598 (per Google Analytics)

Traffic profile: highest post accounted for only 5.8% of traffic. Top 5 posts accounted for less than 20% of traffic.

Finances: profitable (that is, more income than the cost of paying writers excluding me)

Cash Flow: same as last month, tight. Net 60 on ads, so we won’t be making any significant changes until February 09.

Technorati Rank:764

CPM: steady, although can vary in a wide range day to day.

Short term risks: it’s silly season for web traffic, so we’ll either go up in December/ January, or down. Working naturally towards the former.

Note: lots more people read the Month 6 report than normal. My thx for dropping by. I have never, nor do I intend to give a long report every month, but instead at milestones, so I’ll likely do a long report at 9mths and 12mths. Also I’ve switched to month reporting not anniversary reporting, at least for now.

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Child protection groups don’t all like the Great Firewall of Australia either

December 1, 2008 — Leave a comment

Won’t someone think of the children, although only the children of ALP members of Parliament, because even some of the kiddy groups can see that the Government’s Great Firewall of Australia is nonsense.

via SMH:

Support for the Government’s plan to censor the internet has hit rock bottom, with even some children’s welfare groups now saying that that the mandatory filters, aimed squarely at protecting kids, are ineffective and a waste of money….

Holly Doel-Mackaway, adviser with Save the Children, the largest independent children’s rights agency in the world, said educating kids and parents was the way to empower young people to be safe internet users.

She said the filter scheme was “fundamentally flawed” because it failed to tackle the problem at the source and would inadvertently block legitimate resources.

Furthermore there was no evidence to suggest that children were stumbling across child pornography when browsing the web. Doel-Mackaway believes the millions of dollars earmarked to implement the filters would be far better spent on teaching children how to use the internet safely and on law enforcement.

“Children are exposed to the abusive behaviours of adults often and we need to be preventing the causes of violence against children in the community, rather than blocking it from people’s view,” she said.

“The constant change of cyberspace means that a filter is going to be able to be circumvented and it’s going to throw up false positives – many innocent websites, maybe even our own, will be blacklisted because we reference a lot of our work that we do with children in fighting commercial sexual exploitation.”….

James McDougall, director of the National Children’s and Youth Law Centre, expressed similar views to Save the Children.

He said the mandatory filters simply would not work and children should be able to make decisions for themselves. Concerned parents could easily install PC-based filters on their computers if they desired, or ask their internet providers to switch on voluntary filtering.

Hey hey, ho ho, Senator Conroy has to go, hey hey, ho ho….

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Syndication Offer

November 24, 2008 — 4 Comments

The Huffington Post has an interesting way of syndicating some content. The short version is they run the first three or four paragraphs of a post on their site, then end it with “read more here xyz.” I’m not sure if it’s under legal agreement or not, and as a rule I don’t like running that much text from another site on The Inquisitr.

However, if you’re a tech site and you would be cool with us doing something along those lines, email me duncan at nichenet.com.au . We wouldn’t run everything, but on occasion we’d like to run the intro to a post similar to what The Huffington Post does. I can’t promise millions of page views, but we’re pretty close now to some high numbers so you might get some half reasonable traffic from the post + link.

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