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Growing and Money
Written by Scrivs on September 8, 2005
It’s an interesting situation we face and one I am not too sure how to handle. The question of how 9rules makes money has been coming up a lot lately and it seems to be concerning a lot of people and I am not so sure as to why. While most of the time you have folks lambasting the fact that companies are exploiting their customers with price gauging or overpricing a product, we get roasted for not showing any type of revenue model.
Yes there are plans to make money in the future. No it’s nothing sneaky or particularly new. Maybe our culture has been so conditioned to be skeptical towards anything that looks too good to be true. Wish it wasn’t like that, but I guess it is.
Paul Watson has written a great satire about our network in Not Another Network, or NAN. Admittedly from an outsider perspective I would probably write the same thing because it makes sense when you only see half the picture or just don’t believe what we are doing. (Oh and thanks for even considering us as one of the “big boys” Paul, that’s pretty cool) Let’s go over some of these spoof points to see how much truth is really behind them.
Driving Traffic to the Hub
We get asked a lot how much traffic the homepage receives. It must be a lot considering how many people have our logo attached to their site right? I wish. The site really doesn’t get that much traffic at all. Whitespace gets more traffic than it. Looking at the majority of the sites in the Network the button is blended in so well or so far at the bottom that nobody will ever click on it. We don’t tell our members what type of button to add or where to put it. We are happy that they even joined up with us to put the button on their site. We hope they think of it as a sign of quality.
We don’t make that much money from the sponsors on the homepage (ask them, they tell us they are getting a good deal) either and the site was a PR 7 before the Network even began. Maybe one day we will plaster a huge roach ad on the site, but I don’t think that is going to happen because our members would kill us. Hell my partners would kill me.
Oh boy, just saw we got linked on MetaFilter. Let the fun begin.
Get all the A-Listers
Sure it would be cool to have some of the “A-List” in the network. You know the ones that actually still provide some high-quality content, but that isn’t our goal. Sure we ask some of them to join because we are about quality and if they are quality why shouldn’t we go after them? But do we target them? I don’t think so.
Grow, Grow, Grow
It is fine to have it but for one 9Rules needs to go easy on those submissions. It is not scaling and won’t scale, you are just becoming Yahoo! Directory with commentary. I already can’t figure out which sites are worth keeping track of in the 9Rules network.
Honestly Paul, I had this dilemma as well when deciding which approach to go with when starting the Network. Do we only take in 40 sites or do we only take in a 1,000? We decided it best if we don’t set a cap either way because quality is quality. If a site starts to falter on quality we have every right to ask them to leave and if our members see the Network losing it’s value they have every right to leave. Yahoo! made sure to cover every site in the world. We are just trying to cover the really, really good ones. We aren’t asking you to keep track of all of them because many of them probably won’t interest you. But that isn’t to say that our marbles blog (we don’t have one) won’t interest someone else. We are working hard on a new homepage that won’t suffer from the Yahoo effect.
I have written before on how I would like to stop with the design blogs, but it’s hard when another quality one walks in the door. If Shea came saying he wanted to join I wouldn’t turn him away because we capped that niche. We are fully aware that growing to the size we are going is very dangerous and that presenting a large amount of sites properly will be no easy task, but we are going to try for it anyways without sacrificing the quality of the network.
Heck, Weblogs, Inc. still has more sites than we do. They are more Yahoo! than we are.
It’s not easy seeing something you helped create get criticized, but I know that it helps to only make us stronger. I am also glad that people do it because once you have worked on something so long on the inside, it’s hard to step away from it to get an outside perspective. So for that I thank you Paul for writing the piece that I myself could not write.
As for everyone who wonders what the 9 rules actually are, here they are:
- Love what you do.
- Never stop learning.
- Form works with function.
- Simple is beautiful.
- Work hard, play hard.
- You get what you pay for.
- When you talk, we listen.
- Must constantly improve.
- Respect your inspiration.
September 8th, 2005 at 5:54 pm
I wondered about the recent number of submissions, and I guess this post explains a lot, but some things still confuse me. Like the reasoning behind opening a submission round specifically for Spanish websites, maybe I didn’t read the post properly, but I don’t get why. Why not other languages?
Criticism aside, I think the 9rules network is great, and for the most part, the members are pretty high quality websites, and I read a lot of them regularly myself. Kudos on bringing a lot of great resources together.
PS, looks like ordered lists could do with some styling.
September 8th, 2005 at 6:05 pm
What is metafilter?
September 8th, 2005 at 6:10 pm
Metafilter is that site that made 9rules shutdown for about 5 minutes.
September 8th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
Other sites are coming down the pipeline, but for now we went with the Spanish community because the buzz was there and we have some members that are involved in it already so it seemed like the smoothest transition.
September 8th, 2005 at 6:30 pm
Whoops I meant to say other languages are coming down the pipeline. Obviously other sites are coming as well.
September 8th, 2005 at 7:10 pm
Hey guys. I really like what you’re doing at 9rules and how you’re treating your member sites, and I let Paul know about that a little while ago. Out of all the networks (mine included), you’ve got the best brand recognition. Very cool.
But it’s not that people don’t believe in what you’re doing, it’s that no one’s got a clue about what you’re doing so they can support/criticize what you’re doing. So they just cast doubt untill you tell them what you’re doing, so they can tell you that won’t work either. Sigh.
For example, my business model (like the WIN/Gawker model) is media publishing. I want to publish the best damn content to draw traffic. Then, like every publishing business model out there, I sell ads. Included in my media portfolio are forums, static content websites, and affiliate marketing sites.
Some people I pitch don’t believe in it. I love that. It gives me a fresh pair of eyes on my company and alerts me to possible holes that I may have overlooked.
But I think the general feeling about 9rules is that people don’t know what you’re doing here, business-wise. I have a feeling that you’re building massive PR so you can pass onto affiliate sites (your footer) and other feeder sites — skipping the Google sandbox all together?
Keep up the good work, you’re building the suspense nicely
September 8th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
Omar, we definitely aren’t setting things up to raise our PR to offload stuff to affiliate sites. Yes we have a Powertools site connect to this domain, but if you have been following me for the past 2 years you know that I have always had Amazon sites. We may add some more in the future, but that helps to defray some of our minimal costs.
Using our members to push out affiliate sites would be an insult to both them and what we are trying to do. And like I mentioned in the entry we already had a strong PR of 7 before the network so the member sites wouldn’t do much more to help that.
September 8th, 2005 at 8:18 pm
The humorous thing about money is that it seems to matter most when you don’t have it coming in or when you have too much in your possession. 9rules is still taking its baby steps, but despite its continually growing size, people likely forget that quite often (or just plain don’t know).
People are bound to assume a lot and wonder a lot until the network grows to a “medium size.” Then, when it grows to large, very large, proportions, people will wonder who’s cheating them out of their portion. So goes business.
If 9rules can hold out during the hard times, it should be fine. Even greater than that, though, is if 9rules can hold out and keep purity–stay away from corruption. At all costs. Whether anyone believes in God or Karma in any technical sense, those sorts of things really do come back to haunt you, whether personally or in a court room or elsewhere. Keeping open to the public, staying honest when doing so, and not making empty promises/giving false hope are the things that will keep sites like 9rules and any other network alive in the long run.
I’ve kept up with this network since it started, and I’m interested in where it’s going. Personally, I like seeing sites that don’t burn my eyes due to their broken/terrible/etc. designs (there are still far too many out there, considering how many designers are out and about!). Appealing and mostly interesting sites are what 9rules nicely shoves across the table to the general public. I think 9rules will last just fine, provided it keeps on a personal and honest level. People will follow that, as will financial growth.
September 8th, 2005 at 8:21 pm
One day, WordPress will create a temporary edit feature that will make me happy. (Psst, this–”9rules is still taking its baby steps, but despite its continually growing size”–doesn’t make sense, because it’s stupid; replace the word “despite” with “because.”)
September 8th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
Hi, I’m a member on the network and I thought I’d chime in here. For those that are skeptical, Paul Scrivens is being completely honest. And honestly, all of this feels like a gimmick. We at Particletree thought it was something devious and questionable then we had a chance to meet Paul and Paul turned out to be a genuine fellow. I’m not going to say he’s not charming and careful and calculating (because he is), but he’s also honest when it doesn’t pay to be honest. And that’s a rare thing in the business world and rare things should not be ignored.
The community building and networking we’ve been able to do with the other members have been fantastic and unbelievably rewarding. People care about their content more in the network (you can see it in the forums and on the sites). People are honest and criticism is valued. Another rare thing in such a competitive environment.
Everyone is just excited and proud to be a part of something dedicated to just being the best and so in that respect, this network is successful. I think it’s a sad thing to demand that success be tied to the fiscal, but I guess that is this world.
9rules is one of the few places where I am inspired consistently to be better than I was and that’s an amazing thing to be able to say about something larger than yourself. Often the opposite happens, you feel less than and lost and here (even though we are large) there is intimacy and there is a relationship every single day, with nearly every single member.
This is not to say that things could not be better. We are new and new always comes with problems. But I hope people start to realize that the plan is not to hurt or to scheme, but to support and to highlight and to share.
September 9th, 2005 at 3:45 am
I personally think that, if anything, you should be slowing down the growth of 9rules to a level that you can handle. The fact that some people still haven’t heard about their second round submissions and that you started taking in more sites before clearing the backlog shows that you’re taking on too much.
September 9th, 2005 at 4:56 am
(We sure do have a lot of Pauls around here. This is the Paul who Paul of Scrivens fame noted above. Just thought I would clear that up.)
I am glad, though not surprised given Scrivens’ many counter-hype posts, that my post was taken well. Naturally there must have been a few things muttered under your breath but we are all human and that is OK. I think that is important to realise. I am not some slathering creature out simply to harm and I don’t think 9rules is a new evil empire in the making. In fact I like 9rules a good deal, so much so that I care. If I didn’t I would not have bothered writing it.
9rules is a lot more human than the other networks. You get to hear from the CEO all the time, actions are almost always explained in a frank and conversational manner and you can see the enthusiasm bubbling out of its ears. Also members are not forced to do a weekly Best Of 9rules post or even have links to other members in the sidebar.
So that explains my use of 9rules as the main example, I am simply more familiar with it. Heck, I don’t think I am still subscribed to even one Gawker/Weblogs Inc. blog. I personally love visiting 9rules sites because they look good as I read through the great content.
Anyway, thanks for the extra information up above and I look forward to seeing how 9rules dals with the influx of sites.
September 9th, 2005 at 4:57 am
And that was deals, not dals (which is a herb from India that goes great with curry, sans the s.)
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