The experience of creating online media from Yuri Synodov. Part 2
Continuing the conversation with the creator of the resource roem.ru. It will be about:
- The main source of the audience resource was my LiveJournal . Over the six months (since leaving Webplanet to launch), the audience of its regular readers has increased from 100 to 350 people. Of course, it was time-consuming, but the fact that I was constantly writing something there eventually paid off, because all these people eventually switched to roem.ru.
In the first days, 300 people registered, now there are about 1,200, and about 800 are active. Considering that on Webplanet the core in terms of Liveinternet is about 700 people, this is a good result. My core is 350 people.
The dynamic was unexpected, I don’t know why it is so ...
In general, an active audience flows and makes itself felt fairly quickly. When in August, Lech Andreev and Masha Formanyuk went on vacation, and Lech asked to look after the Veblaneta, I decided - and why not, despite my project. And quickly enough, the number of comments increased, discussions started ... The most active audience appears fairly quickly.
As for the sources of visitors, there were several successful affiliate programs:
- And they are actually no more. There are very few resources with people working in the Internet industry. I strongly doubt that I can agree on the exchange of content with existing resources, because it probably does not suit them - they are likely to lose the audience, and will gain very little.
I try to keep in touch with programmer conferences like RIT and Highload, because as soon as a person becomes interested in such events, he gets into the target audience. I think it’s wrong to be quite new at the Internet, because such people, firstly, can quickly learn and leave, and secondly, there will be no viral spread, and then you have to attract the 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, I place them for money, most likely, would quickly have refused, because the CTR of banners they have is 0.2-0.5%. And in general, I consider the scheme with paid shows to be correct only for the media with expensive advertising, where you sell your audience to an advertiser more expensive. I still can not sell all the shows.
In addition, I have a thematic audience, and it’s impossible to track its subject matter when buying banners. On the page where my user goes from advertising, it says: what is this site, what are the possibilities. There are no banners on it so that advertisers do not think that their shows are winding up.
')
When you come to an advertiser and declare a thematic audience (exactly the one you need) - it works, you can then say a high price ...
- Advertisers believe the word or check?
- They believe in the word.
- Why not wind it up then?
- First, the statistics is open, and you can always check it. 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 chased for the purchase traffic. I myself wrote on Webplanet that the purchase traffic is not bad, but as a resource owner, I don’t want to run and prove that I am not a camel (that the purchase traffic is of normal quality), (that is, it’s better not to buy it at all).
- By the way, on Roem there were discussions about the purchase traffic, that if people follow the headings, it means they are thematic users.
- There is still such a thing, that if you look at the reports of TNS Gallup, the audience profile on different resources differs very slightly. But if managers are most interested in advertisers, and if on one resource they are 10%, and on the other - 20%, then it is considered that advertising on the second should cost 2 times more. How, then, is it possible that managers are only 1.1 times more, and advertising is more expensive than 3?
First, the fact is that on all Internet resources the majority of the audience is random visitors who will not re-enter the resource. 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 on the socio-demographic indicators of regular visitors - PN comment). For access to the opinion leaders (decision makers), advertisers are willing to pay. And an error in the distribution of "Vedomosti" showed what kind of audience there really was - it turned out that there were quite a few managers, and quite large ones.
Our audience is people working in Internet companies, and there are 100,000 of them. Now we have 25,000 in a month, and when they become 100,000, they will have nowhere to grow.
- Do you understand how to come from 25 to 100 thousand?
- How? Need to work :)
I do not like to talk about plans, because they tend to change. There was an idea to make a freelance stock exchange, but then I looked at the existing resources, their audience, the complexity of development ... and realized that it would not be worth it.
- And did you count the cost of visitors?
- No, and besides, they all got 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 you have increased attendance today and at the expense of what kind of promotion efforts. - And why did it happen that prominent figures of the Runet who are not on other resources are noted on roem.ru? If Igor Ashmanov can be seen in many places, then Pavel Durov is hardly anywhere else.
- Yes! To admit, I did not expect to see Durov ... He seemed to me a rather closed man. However, we have some discussions with us ...
I think the rejection of user ratings was decisive in order not to get such a situation 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 newsmakers, put them up. As a result, an atmosphere has been created that we listen to the opinion of influential people, no one will offend them and trample in the dirt.
However, 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 bit confusing, we need to somehow solve this problem ... but it is not clear how.
The design is also not decisive for the success of the project - if you put everything in bare HTML, like on compromat.ru , then there will be the same attendance (apparently, roem.ru doesn’t have the same design :) - approx. P.N.)
As the engine was taken Bitrix, because transfers of foreign options are always lame. And with Bitrix it turned out quite simply - he came, asked and received the engine for free use.
We started with a monstrous bug, which was strange, as they could not have noticed: when clicking on “read more”, a person got to the main news page. During the first few days, I had so many messages in ICQ that I closed many windows without reading. Revealed deficiencies are still being raked - and this is normal for such a resource. Actually, when launching, I was counting on tolerance for bugs, because the audience itself understands that this is inevitable when the project is launched.
The only thing that bothered me was the privacy of the data. Even I can not find out who left comments under the nickname Alter Ego. And this tactic justified itself in a couple of months, when they came up with questions from the same 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. - How much? A couple of hours, all day? ..
- In fact, the time to write a note (along 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 (and I still think that I am writing quality materials). And besides, there is not always something to write about.
This is now the main problem - to keep 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 of all the places where there is interesting news may take more than a day - that is, you simply cannot keep track of all the news. And this is a problem that worries 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 to ask it yourself).
- And the same webplanet guys, and people like them - will not work?
- At Webplanet, the concept is built on a different one: the news is based on some fact that is played up, quoted, a prehistory is added - that's all. And I want better, but there are already few. I am interested in people with brains who understand not only in the Internet business, but also at the everyday level. And such people do not stay long in journalism and flow into more profitable branches.
I am now also offered to give up the roem and go, but I answer with the phrase of Comrade Sukhov - better still torment. Because the information that is being told to me, I would hardly have known if I was an employee of some competing company. And since I was not seen in uncontrolled plums, they trust me. I see this as a good school, and my value during the work on the project has increased significantly, and from this point of view the occupation of roem.ru will never be unprofitable.
I think that the problem about which we started talking will be reduced to the fact that I will have no one to leave roem.ru. Just as it happened with Webplanet - when Denis Kryuchkov left, she began to sausage. I would not like this.
- 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 the work? If you now sell a resource, it turns out that I’ll just trade my salary share, but I don’t 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. That's why I am pleased with the increase in attendance of non-repository sections. When their attendance is about 50 times more than the news, there will be no problems with selling. Now they are only 2.5 times more popular, and they were 1.5.
People working in the Internet industry are able to correctly focus attention, although they may not be able to write - however, I cannot write either. And if you put a replaceable editor on top of them - then it will already be a full service.
- How do you think, how much more will increase this ratio?
- I expect to be engaged in Roy for another 1.5-2 years. And those 100,000 visitors can be expected in 3 years, when the CIS countries develop.
Prepared by Pavel Nosikov
- attracting visitors to the resource (end),
- attracting traffic altogether
- the prospects of Roem as a business and Yuri as its creator
- features of the technical and content part of the project.
- The main source of the audience resource was my LiveJournal . Over the six months (since leaving Webplanet to launch), the audience of its regular readers has increased from 100 to 350 people. Of course, it was time-consuming, but the fact that I was constantly writing something there eventually paid off, because all these people eventually switched to roem.ru.
In the first days, 300 people registered, now there are about 1,200, and about 800 are active. Considering that on Webplanet the core in terms of Liveinternet is about 700 people, this is a good result. My core is 350 people.
The dynamic was unexpected, I don’t know why it is so ...
In general, an active audience flows and makes itself felt fairly quickly. When in August, Lech Andreev and Masha Formanyuk went on vacation, and Lech asked to look after the Veblaneta, I decided - and why not, despite my project. And quickly enough, the number of comments increased, discussions started ... The most active audience appears fairly quickly.
As for the sources of visitors, there were several successful affiliate programs:
- banner advertising at conferences. For Highload (probably, ClientSide is meant, because Highload took place before the opening of roem.ru - note PN), Rogozhin himself ordered the conference (organizer of the conference), the result was an interesting situation when ordered by him 2 * 3 banner turned out to be the biggest at the event, people gathered next to it, took pictures ... Advertising was also at the Ashman conference, in front of it I specifically made several publications on search engine optimization so that people would come and see that the resource was for them.
- advertise on rutube . Their contribution turned out to be quite significant, giving 25-33% of transitions.
- And they are actually no more. There are very few resources with people working in the Internet industry. I strongly doubt that I can agree on the exchange of content with existing resources, because it probably does not suit them - they are likely to lose the audience, and will gain very little.
I try to keep in touch with programmer conferences like RIT and Highload, because as soon as a person becomes interested in such events, he gets into the target audience. I think it’s wrong to be quite new at the Internet, because such people, firstly, can quickly learn and leave, and secondly, there will be no viral spread, and then you have to attract the 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, I place them for money, most likely, would quickly have refused, because the CTR of banners they have is 0.2-0.5%. And in general, I consider the scheme with paid shows to be correct only for the media with expensive advertising, where you sell your audience to an advertiser more expensive. I still can not sell all the shows.
In addition, I have a thematic audience, and it’s impossible to track its subject matter when buying banners. On the page where my user goes from advertising, it says: what is this site, what are the possibilities. There are no banners on it so that advertisers do not think that their shows are winding up.
')
When you come to an advertiser and declare a thematic audience (exactly the one you need) - it works, you can then say a high price ...
- Advertisers believe the word or check?
- They believe in the word.
- Why not wind it up then?
- First, the statistics is open, and you can always check it. 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 chased for the purchase traffic. I myself wrote on Webplanet that the purchase traffic is not bad, but as a resource owner, I don’t want to run and prove that I am not a camel (that the purchase traffic is of normal quality), (that is, it’s better not to buy it at all).
- By the way, on Roem there were discussions about the purchase traffic, that if people follow the headings, it means they are thematic users.
- There is still such a thing, that if you look at the reports of TNS Gallup, the audience profile on different resources differs very slightly. But if managers are most interested in advertisers, and if on one resource they are 10%, and on the other - 20%, then it is considered that advertising on the second should cost 2 times more. How, then, is it possible that managers are only 1.1 times more, and advertising is more expensive than 3?
First, the fact is that on all Internet resources the majority of the audience is random visitors who will not re-enter the resource. 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 on the socio-demographic indicators of regular visitors - PN comment). For access to the opinion leaders (decision makers), advertisers are willing to pay. And an error in the distribution of "Vedomosti" showed what kind of audience there really was - it turned out that there were quite a few managers, and quite large ones.
Our audience is people working in Internet companies, and there are 100,000 of them. Now we have 25,000 in a month, and when they become 100,000, they will have nowhere to grow.
- Do you understand how to come from 25 to 100 thousand?
- How? Need to work :)
I do not like to talk about plans, because they tend to change. There was an idea to make a freelance stock exchange, but then I looked at the existing resources, their audience, the complexity of development ... and realized that it would not be worth it.
- And did you count the cost of visitors?
- No, and besides, they all got 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 you have increased attendance today and at the expense of what kind of promotion efforts. - And why did it happen that prominent figures of the Runet who are not on other resources are noted on roem.ru? If Igor Ashmanov can be seen in many places, then Pavel Durov is hardly anywhere else.
- Yes! To admit, I did not expect to see Durov ... He seemed to me a rather closed man. However, we have some discussions with us ...
I think the rejection of user ratings was decisive in order not to get such a situation 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 newsmakers, put them up. As a result, an atmosphere has been created that we listen to the opinion of influential people, no one will offend them and trample in the dirt.
However, 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 bit confusing, we need to somehow solve this problem ... but it is not clear how.
The security forces 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 emergence 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 exactly that. In my opinion the experience of creating the first project is always more expensive than all subsequent ones, because all the difficulties have already been solved and a common core has been developed. Clone projects are only content, the first project is content + engine, and when content is largely taken from users, development of the engine - determining stage in the total for developmental performance. - PN note)The design is also not decisive for the success of the project - if you put everything in bare HTML, like on compromat.ru , then there will be the same attendance (apparently, roem.ru doesn’t have the same design :) - approx. P.N.)
As the engine was taken Bitrix, because transfers of foreign options are always lame. And with Bitrix it turned out quite simply - he came, asked and received the engine for free use.
We started with a monstrous bug, which was strange, as they could not have noticed: when clicking on “read more”, a person got to the main news page. During the first few days, I had so many messages in ICQ that I closed many windows without reading. Revealed deficiencies are still being raked - and this is normal for such a resource. Actually, when launching, I was counting on tolerance for bugs, because the audience itself understands that this is inevitable when the project is launched.
The only thing that bothered me was the privacy of the data. Even I can not find out who left comments under the nickname Alter Ego. And this tactic justified itself in a couple of months, when they came up with questions from the same 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 a job, not a business
- How much time is now spent on the project?- In fact, all the time. - How much? A couple of hours, all day? ..
- In fact, the time to write a note (along 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 (and I still think that I am writing quality materials). And besides, there is not always something to write about.
This is now the main problem - to keep 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 of all the places where there is interesting news may take more than a day - that is, you simply cannot keep track of all the news. And this is a problem that worries 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 to ask it yourself).
- And the same webplanet guys, and people like them - will not work?
- At Webplanet, the concept is built on a different one: the news is based on some fact that is played up, quoted, a prehistory is added - that's all. And I want better, but there are already few. I am interested in people with brains who understand not only in the Internet business, but also at the everyday level. And such people do not stay long in journalism and flow into more profitable branches.
I am now also offered to give up the roem and go, but I answer with the phrase of Comrade Sukhov - better still torment. Because the information that is being told to me, I would hardly have known if I was an employee of some competing company. And since I was not seen in uncontrolled plums, they trust me. I see this as a good school, and my value during the work on the project has increased significantly, and from this point of view the occupation of roem.ru will never be unprofitable.
I think that the problem about which we started talking will be reduced to the fact that I will have no one to leave roem.ru. Just as it happened with Webplanet - when Denis Kryuchkov left, she began to sausage. I would not like this.
- 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 the work? If you now sell a resource, it turns out that I’ll just trade my salary share, but I don’t 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. That's why I am pleased with the increase in attendance of non-repository sections. When their attendance is about 50 times more than the news, there will be no problems with selling. Now they are only 2.5 times more popular, and they were 1.5.
People working in the Internet industry are able to correctly focus attention, although they may not be able to write - however, I cannot write either. And if you put a replaceable editor on top of them - then it will already be a full service.
- How do you think, how much more will increase this ratio?
- I expect to be engaged in Roy for another 1.5-2 years. And those 100,000 visitors can be expected in 3 years, when the CIS countries develop.
Prepared by Pavel Nosikov
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/23545/
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