Crenk » down

Spiral Frog (Ad-supported music service) In Trouble and Heading Towards Deadpool

Steven Finch — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:40:12 +0000

There is another music streaming service that we didn’t mention in our Top 10 free music streaming services and that is Spiral Frog. Spiral Frog is an ad-supported music download service which has had a huge amount of hype since launch.

Today it has been reported that Spiral Frog might be in a bit of trouble and heading towards the deadpool. These reports come from executives within the struggling company. Why is Spiral Frog in trouble? When launching Spiral Frog was in a growing advertising market in which was still yielding good CPM (cost per 1000 ads) rates, however now in the economic downturn these rates are quickly dropping. Therefore, companies need to keep increasing pageviews and presence to stay ahead of the curve. Spiral Frog has been losing a lot of traffic of late and this combined with the big licensing fees they had to pay upfront for major label catalogues means their in a lot of trouble.

There are only a couple of options that will save Spiral Frog. Firstly, a miracle could happen and they could turn around the traffic and the revenues, but that’s not going to happen. Secondly, they could get more funding and sell part of the shares, but they are running out of shares so I don’t think this would happen either. Finally, the only real option is for someone to step in and purchase the company just before they run out of money and get a bargain basement price.

To be fair in the past Spiral Frog has had a lot of issues and they have been in trouble a couple of times. This is probably what has lead to Spiral Frog getting a lot of media attention. I think Spiral Frog will be acquired by the end of 2009, its the only decent option of the company.

Are My Sites Up: Monitors When Your Sites Are Down and Send Notifications

Steven Finch — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:00:41 +0000

There are so many places on the net these days where you can track if a specific website is down for just you or for the entire internet. Today I have no idea why but I wanted to introduce you to another such startup, Are My Sites Up.

Are My Sites Up is a new web based startup that allows you to track the up time of web sites and it even sends you notifications when they are down.

Currently in the free service you are able to setup 50 sites to monitor and for that you also receive a great control panel and even set it to email you or send you an SMS update when one of your monitored sites is down. The service requires no ownership of or modification to the web sites you are monitoring, you can use it on your own site or any site you want to keep an eye on.

Brian Gardner’s Revolutiontwo.com is Down and No Longer Free

Steven Finch — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:08:27 +0000

I was on Brian Gardner’s new project RevolutionTwo.com and previous there has been a lot of talk about this project, because he was offering free downloads but with paid support. This afternoon I went onto his new site and noticed that you can no longer download the themes for free and that they are now all paid themes. I find this a bit of a weird mood by Brian, is this because he was simply just not making any money from paid support?

I went back onto the site a couple of minutes ago and noticed that the site is now down due to a database error. Is this because it has been hacked or it Brian updating something? Anyone have any tips?

The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude

Steven Finch — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:48:31 +0000

This is brilliant and just had to share it.