Sharing some of the analytics behind how you think people use the site would probably make for a much more interesting discussion around monetization.
EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing.
And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc?
Those are dramatically different user segments / values.
You've got a bit of a 31-flavors UX where I can do a lot, but as a result wonder if you could massively pare this down, improve focus, and discover monetization through understanding what people actually use it for.
SEO is the largest feeder of traffic for Twicsy. People get there by searching for a very long tail of things. But there are quite a few that return just to browse around it seems, or check out the top photos.
Agreed, the UX/UI is terrible. One big problem is that I am a terrible web developer, I am really just a back end data guy that knows enough to be dangerous on the front end.
But that's part of the reason why I think it has much more potential. The site gets a ton of traffic despite its obvious flaws. If I had the funds to do a redesign and even execute well on the basics who knows what could happen?
Free because I think the project has potential but the developer seems to not be interested in investing money on a redesign. If a free design can renew interest in the project, I think its a worthwhile cause.
On a related note, I also do free designs for open source projects (eg. vlc, ack). So if your have an open source project that you think could benefit from design, feel free to get in touch with me.
Working on such project helps me not just get my name out there, but also lets me learn a lot more than I can in commercial projects, since I usually get more creative freedom when I'm contributing my time rather than being paid for it.
I think he'll get money along the way. Link to his portfolio, more followers on Twitter, more people knowing what he does and everything else that comes with popularity.
Given how long you've been doing this, you've overlapped with my last startup, which had similar issues (Edgeio.com - long since defunct; we started development in 2005; sold off the assets end of 2007; the service was a classified aggregator).
We got a huge amount of traffic via SEO, and lots of long tail traffic (e.g. we'd come up first for a huge number of zip codes). A big problem with our consumer site was atrocious bounce rates: Most people clicked through out of curiosity, looked around on that single page or maybe one more, and left never to be seen again, because we did a really poor job of hooking them unless they happened to be looking for classified ads matching that particular long tail term, which few were. We should in retrospect have treated those visits as someone watching an ad for our site, rather than as a conscious visit by a user of our site, because most of our traffic was from people who likely did not even realise what the site was about by the time they clicked back or closed the window.
A big part of the challenge for you as well, I think, is driving down bounce rates and challenging those users into other parts of the site and to repeat visits by helping them "get" what they can get out of the site other than 15 seconds of looking at that one image.
If I was you, I'd segment users hard on referrals vs. direct traffic and cookied vs. uncookied (assume first time visitors). First of all, are you earning any money on those first time referral users? If not, that gives you total freedom to experiment. But regardless, subject the first time referred users to an absolute battery of segmented tests (A/B or multivariate or whatever scheme you're comfortable you can analyze results from) with pretty much the sole purpose of figuring out how to get more of those users to visit more sticky pages. Especially if people are coming in from long tail searches, I think you'd be better focusing on turning them into users than "drive by" assaulting them with ads like it feels like the site currently is doing.
E.g. consider imgur. Consider users coming to imgur pages from Reddit (consider your specific traffic sources, and whether or not you can do anything "special" for them)- not only do they get an interface to navigate that in many cases are more convenient than continuing to browse the equivalent image reddits, but you can even go to imgur.com/r/someimagereddit (e.g. http://imgur.com/r/pics) and get all the pictures from that subreddit in one place. It's seductive. Then there's ability to comment. The image pages themselves are extremely clean. It's seductive.
While if I get to your site from Google search results (say by entering "twitter babes" and going to the image results - I tested, it gives a Twicsy result high up, in between the porn), I need to go below the fold to even realize that there are related pictures, and there are no "niceties" like being able to use cursor left/right to move through a "gallery", or space to enlarge the image, as on imgur.com (if there are on Twicsy, I didn't notice them). What is there is massively distracting ads.
Imgur is teasing people in when they hit it for the first time, making it very tempting to click one more image, while your site is pretty much bunching people in the face with ads, which makes it hard to even discover the potential.
I agree wholeheartedly with a lot of what you are saying. As I talked to many many people this year about funding and strategy for Twicsy I came to the conclusion that Twicsy needs to start funneling the pictures into topical verticals. I think this would help for 3 reasons:
1. It would increase engagement with users. I think they would finally understand how Twicsy could be an interesting daily destination because they could just focus on their topics of interest.
2. It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against porn, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers, and allow us to target said advertising more easily. For popular verticals we could do direct ad sales which would be >100x more lucrative than the crap we serve now.
3. I think it would facilitate media partnerships. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but I think that if number 1 holds true that we could land partners for popular verticals.
The problems are that I basically ran out of time and money to be able to execute on this. I need money for a complete redesign to shift the focus to the topical verticals, and I need more time to execute on the back end tech to fill these verticals (maybe 2 months). I didn't need a ton of money, but even in this "easy time to raise money" I was unable to find an investor. I think the biggest reason for this is that I don't have a well rounded team in place, so part of this year I spent looking for a partner to focus on the business side. I was hoping I would meet someone that saw the potential as I did and believed we were right on the verge of something big. But I never found that person.
On repeat visits, yes the number of people that visit us just once is quite high. 5.8 million of the past 7.6 million visits were just one-timers. But there were over 350k people that visited us 9 or more times last month. And there were over 35k people that visited us 201 or more times. So that gives me reason to believe there are some real Twicsy fans out there! And, as I repeatedly say, we are succeeding despite the glaring drawbacks and problems with the site. Imagine if it wasn't such a piece of crap!
> It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against pr0n, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers
I bet this is your main problem. Having experience with a site which has similar numbers (less in fact), I was surprised to know that you are able to generate only so much, as to cover hosting expense. And on that related note, which is another "top tier advertiser" network other than Google's?
The only other reason I can think of is you having a very high bounce rate, something above 90%?
Sorry, for being (inadvertently) blunt. But this is my area of some experience and also interest.
EG - I can't figure out how or why 6m uniques would show up here, or what they're doing.
And that's not an insult, I am curious - are they looking for discovery / trends? Are they looking to see all the latest pics of a user? etc?
Those are dramatically different user segments / values.
You've got a bit of a 31-flavors UX where I can do a lot, but as a result wonder if you could massively pare this down, improve focus, and discover monetization through understanding what people actually use it for.