Crenk

I came across a really great post today over at PingPongPie that helped to explain what you need to achieve with certain social networks, and how much traffic you can expect from them. I have added the exact numbers below.

Name of Network: Digg
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 60 – 300+ on average
Consequence of Negative Vote: Requires more Diggs to become popular. NOTE: One Bury does not cause your story to be removed! You can have a significant amount of “buries” and the story could still go popular.
Expected Traffic: 10,000 to 100,000 UVs
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: Stumble
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 30 – 40 typically, Reviews and Tags are also important
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 to overall points
Expected Traffic: 2,000 – 50,000 UVs and the cycle can come again weeks to months later.
Type of Network: Toolbar - random

Name of Network: Propeller
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 35+ on average
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 to overall points
Expected Traffic: 1,000 – 20,000 UVs – Can go to 100,000 if the story goes to news.aol.com
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: del.icio.us
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: More than 120 bookmarks (as fast as you can)
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 Vote
Expected Traffic: Up to 20,000
Type of Network: Techy, Internet based info, guides

Name of Network: Mixx
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 30 - 60
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 to overall points
Expected Traffic: Less than 100 UVs
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: Reddit
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 3 – 300+
Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 total points
Expected Traffic: 3,000 – 30,000 UVs
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: Yahoo! Buzz
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: N/A. Popular is Yahoo.com and that is manually selected.
Consequence of Negative Vote: Unknown
Expected Traffic: 1-3 million UVs
Type of Network: Social News

Name of Network: Fark
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: Admin manually select for Popular
Consequence of Negative Vote: unknown
Expected Traffic: 5,000 to 15,000 UVs
Type of Network: Humor

Name of Network: Ebaumsworld
Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 30
Expected Traffic: 500-20,000+
Type of Network: Weird, Wacky Stuff, Interesting and Funny Pictures work really well.

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9Rules has just opened their submission window. I have already submitted Crenk to 9Rules, so we can see if we actually get into the fold this time. 9Rules is basically a community of some of the worlds best blogs. It helps readers find information from credible sources and not just any smuck writing a blog. Their submission window is only 24hrs and done every quarter normally. If the 9Rules guys read this post, come on how can you not have Crenk in your network!

Bittorrent traffic is currently at an all time high with 3 bittorrent sites inside the top 120 on Alexa. There popularity is unquestionable and they will be around for a long time to come, but currently this smart file sharing service is a little difficult for beginners.

That being said a new site called TorrentRelay simplifies the entire bittorrent process. TorrentRelay helps to convert downloaded urls into links in which can be downloaded from within any internet browser. This site is unique because it allows newbies to get their torrents without having to install any extra software. No installations allows this service to be run on any computer, mobile or games console.

There currently is only one problem with this service and it is that users can only downoad files up to 400mb in size, once this can be lifted then torrents with be available to even more of the internet populations without having tech issues.

Let’s face facts, bloggers write, for the most part, so their articles can be read. They want them read for any number of reasons,

• Internet fame
• Potential to make money from ads
• Obsessed with statistics
• Conceited
• Enjoying knowing someone is reading what you wrote
• Etc.

Most of us enjoy knowing that someone is reading what we as writers spent time and energy to write, the side effects of money and fame can be nice as well, but how to achieve? One simple way that I’ve found is to ask people to view your site. But how? Where? Relying on Google search results can take time and not everyone reads your MySpace bulletins or the tweets you obsessively send via Twitter, digg.com isn’t working that well and neither is Stumble Upon, and it may not be in your budget to buy ad space on a more popular site right now, so what can you do?

Email blog owners who have written similar articles and let them know about the one you wrote. Yes, it’s that simple. Don’t do this with every article you write, pick your very best and send the links to the biggest and best blogs out there. Don’t ask them to review your site or link to it, simply let them know you have written similar material that they or their readers might want to use and you like their site. Be honest and don’t make it sound cheesy.

How do you find people with similar articles? Try Google Blog Search and look for articles written in the last week or month. Does this really work? Absolutely. I used this technique last week, here’s what I did and the results from it.

They filmed part of the Transformers II movie in my town last week and some co-workers got behind the scenes photographs of the set and a video. They gave me permission to blog about it, which I promptly did. Next, I did a Google Blog Search for similar sites and found the Transformers Live Action Movie Blog, the owners email is displayed on the left sidebar. This is the email I sent him:

I saw you recently published an article & photos regarding Transformers 2… wanted to share with you one my recent articles with more photos and a video (with more videos being edited now for publication).

Thought your readers might enjoy these: http://www.randomn3ss.com/2008/06/05/exclusive-filming-of-transformers-2-photos-and-videos/

That’s it. Within a few hours, they published this article that contains a link to my site’s homepage and the direct link to the article. More than 1,000 unique visits came to that specific article over the following 12 hours from the Transformers Live Action Movie Blog. I’d call that a success.

I’ve used this technique sparingly as not to become a burden on anyone, seem pushy or ungrateful for what others have done for me. Using this method though, I have successfully had articles linking to my sites on Lifehacker.com, GetRichSlowly.org, and several other very well known high traffic blogs.

I’d love to hear about some success stories from people who give this a try. Not every email you send will have great results, but it does work. Keep an open mind too when a fellow blogger approaches you with an idea or to share content.

It has been reported by the guys over at Techcrunch that Alexa has changed the algorithm for their ratings. Alexa announced that they are pulling in more sources than just the Alexa toolbar and that they have also improved their methodology.

This has all come as a pleasant change. For a long time Alexa has been criticized because of their ratings and the fact that they are just completely made up and not really relevant. There has been a lot of sites that have take a huge hit, main example is DailyBlogTips.

In the race for providing the most accurate stats of websites for free, I still think Compete and Quantcast are a long way ahead of Alexa, but these changes might make a huge change in how relevant the popularity numbers actually are.

Display Advertising Opportunity

Currently, Yahoo is a long way behind in several market, but they seem to have a great opportunity improve in this area. In the first slide attached to the previous article it states that the top 2 players control more than 90% of the search market, whereas in the display advertising market, the top 10 players only control less than 25% of the market. Hmmm. This being said there is a great opportunity for Yahoo to control this market as there are no real dominant players.

Additionally, I can see Yahoo taking a keen focus on the markets with very high CPM rates, such as classifieds, search and online video. The online video acquisition not too long ago of the Maven networks has now been justified.

Currently, Yahoo also has a strong presence in classified sections, in terms of jobs and autos, but there are more targets they could approach in this area. Craigslist comes to mind. The site is still currently owned by Craig Newmark with a 25% stake owned by eBay. This could be a potential target for Yahoo to quickly expand their growth in this area.

The second area which currently has a strong CPM is search. Yahoo is currently second in the search race, but are really a long way behind in search marketshare itself and more importantly being able to provide unique search sales services. This was supposed to come from the Panama service, but it has never really been upto standard. With the Panama system Yahoo estimate they can reduce the gap between the industry leading RPS and their own by 30% in the US in the first 9 months of 2007. I simply just cant see this happening.

CapEx and Investing:

Yahoo plan on investing aggressively and spending $2.6 billion cumulatively from 2008-2010. The are focused on Display Advertising, Grid expansion, relevance and experimentation. Hence, you will see Yahoo purchase some strong display advertising network in 2008-2010, my bet is a ValueClick purchase. Valueclick is one of the larger ad networks still left independent and they have a strong focus on display advertising.

Innovation inside Yahoo:

Im very interested to see how Yahoo Buzz progresses. It has been reported about a lot in the last few days about how much traffic the site is pushing and im keep to see this expanded, but not expanded too much. Quality rather than quantity.

Revenue Increase: Are They Realistic?

Yahoo is projecting revenues after traffic acquisition costs (TAC)—i.e., what it shares with other Websites that run Yahoo ads—to grow from $5.1 billion in 2007 to $8.8 billion in 2010. Yahoo also argued to its board that it could exceed Wall Street expectations and accelerate revenue-growth to 25 percent in 2009 and 2010 and increase its operating cash flow from $1.9 billion this year to $3.7 billion in 2010.

Are these figures realistic?? We can only wait and see!

Today, Yahoo filed a presentation which was detailed just before the Microsoft unsolicited bid. This three year financial plan was shown given by management to its board of directors back in December 2007. As you can see from the projections, Yahoo has project their revenue after traffic acquisition costs, which is what it shares with other Websites that run Yahoo ads—to grow from $5.1 billion in 2007 to $8.8 billion in 2010.

These slides come curtosy of Techcrunch. We will have our own analysis of these slides coming in the next few days, so stay tuned.

As most of you have noticed i added BlogRush to our sidebar. Yesterday BlogRush finally got their stats section online and it has show some very good results so far. Crenk’s amount of traffic has doubled in the last 2 days and from what i can see this is from BlogRush. It works quite simply, when the BlogRush widget is viewed on your website your link will be show on the widget on someone elses website. Thus providing links on other sites we would not normally receive and thus giving the opportunity for visitors to clicks and visit our site. Brilliant idea!

I love people that come up with ideas like this and instead of trying to complicate it they just provide the basics. Feedjit provides real-time traffic data on your blog. It is so simple im sure my little sister could even use it. Just cut and paste in the code into your site and it is ready to go. There is no registration and it’s completely free. They also track popular links across blogs, so if your site is the first to link to a popular site, your blog may appear on their home page, which im sure is not going to boost your traffic, but it is just a nice touch.