I've been in that situation, but we were 'all in', so, no part timers, just full timers.
Our competitor was funded with 30M and had two major brands supporting them through bundling deals. If it had not been for major mistakes on their side (fancy office, some idiot MBA as a CEO, out of control burn rate) I doubt we would have survived.
As it was though, we won the battle by simply outlasting them, as soon as the big money was spent and they still couldn't turn a profit the investors refused a second round and the company was shut down.
I recall one conversation with that CEO during a talk about a potential takeover and he told me that 'You are going to lose this, because we are playing chicken on the highway and we have just thrown out the steering wheel'. Not six months later they were history.
It's still running (ww.com), it makes some money but not as much as it used to. Our 'exit' was on the table on 9/9/2001, events beyond our control caused that to be put on hold.
After that the person that was going to be CEO and that had brokered the exit left the company to move to Spain and I continued to run it up and until the present.
Ai yai yai! If you could avoid the first thing I see on your page being a naked man attempting to contort his body to look like a woman, that'd be awesome.
One of the not so nice side effects of having a site that allows people to broadcast themselves on the net is that it attracts people that in normal life you'd not want anything to do with.
This was our 'hidden cost' that we didn't bargain for when we launched the site, we never figured that this would happen (call me naive...) and how much work it would be to keep the site clean.
It is also the main reason that I'm working on different stuff these days, I am in no way 'proud' of my achievement, it's been amazingly successful in monetary terms but I could really do without all the side effects.
edit: This individual has been 'taken care of', thanks.
Feel free to suggest any solution that does not require 24x7 oversight.
We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on salaries doing that in the past and even then it is almost impossible to keep the 'jerks' out.
For every not-so-nice person you block two more will pop up.
And then we're not yet mentioning the spammers, the porn sites and all the other stuff you don't want on your site.
Hang around long enough on ww.com s homepage and you'll see anything that is possible in life (including people being born, dying, marriages and so on). It's got lots of fun stuff but the 'adult' angle is on some days a reason for me to just go and do something completely different for a while because I no longer wish to deal with it.
I don't want to take a look at the site because I'm at work, and value my job, but do you encourage any of the site users to help weed out the crap?
I have a few communities and admittedly, they're not webcam oriented (which likely helps), but they pretty much moderate themselves. (Report links, power-users being assigned moderator powers, etc)
Yes, we did that too, all the obvious ideas we have tried at some point in the last decade.
Having the users police each other works as long as there is no abuse of that power, as soon as they figure out how to game the system you get 'cliques' that will do such funny things as ban all the gays, all the old people, all the women and so on. Pretty soon there'd be nobody left.
I'm 100% convinced that it is possible somehow though, just that I haven't found it yet so please keep those 'obvious' ideas coming, maybe one of these days someone hits the jackpot.
That's a good idea. But it is also 'gameable', in other words let's all do bad stuff on ww.com so we can ban ourselves over and over again...
The only thing I can think of that would really crack it is software that will analyze the images from the camera and ban the perps before anybody gets to see the images. That's a pretty tall order software wise though, I don't think I'm good enough for such a task (even though I occasionally get mad enough to try my hand at it again).
Our competitor was funded with 30M and had two major brands supporting them through bundling deals. If it had not been for major mistakes on their side (fancy office, some idiot MBA as a CEO, out of control burn rate) I doubt we would have survived.
As it was though, we won the battle by simply outlasting them, as soon as the big money was spent and they still couldn't turn a profit the investors refused a second round and the company was shut down.
I recall one conversation with that CEO during a talk about a potential takeover and he told me that 'You are going to lose this, because we are playing chicken on the highway and we have just thrown out the steering wheel'. Not six months later they were history.