Insignificant Eddy
OTOH, aside from the ad revenue I wonder what sort of advantage that really gives aboutus. If we believe that a good idea can spread very quickly then it seems to me that the ambi ent traffic level of aboutus is only an advantage very early in the game. If we assume that the "big idea" is not yet embodied in the offering and that a "big idea" is coming then comparing two worlds: a) the world we are in now w/ 60k visitors a day versus b) a world where we didn't have 60k visitors a day, then there doesn't seem to be a huge difference between the two. Maybe the 60k visitors a day gets you promoted a bit sooner. Then again a good placement in TechCrunch could do similarly (granted TechCrunch would die off whereas the 60k per day is fairly consistent).
- Agree that 60k visitors per day is just a drop in the bucket ... AND ... we're learning what we need to know right now ... before drinking out of the firehose ... these are mostly social issues ... how to interact with the community ... etc
Without belittling the achievement it's fair to say that in the grand scheme, where AboutUs sits right now is that it is an eddy in the huge Internet river. Bugs get caught in the foam generated in that eddy. Fish -- like your big sponsors come and eat those bugs. See everything can be related to Fly Fishing :) What I don't know is, how much can that eddy be grown? It does not seem to me that people are going to generate enough hand-crafted wiki content to cause significant growth of this model. And growth through SEO means seems like more of the same "trickery". Again, I have nothing against playing some tricks, but I am calling attention to the disparity between that business model and what you described in our recent call as the next big thing for AboutUs.
- We're insignificant ... we're even scavengers ... and kind of sly and shifty (trickery)
- We don't want to be. Is a few hundred a day worth our soul as a company? Does it neccesarily follow that our soul is forfeit just because we do something that is like something we know is bad?
