Our Digg Genesis

We started off reading and "digging" stories from our favorite RSS feeds and quickly moved to posting some of our own writing. "Uh oh," you say, "bad blogger."

No, not really. For three reasons:

• It's not against the TOS at digg
• As our readers will know, we don't have a spam blog in any way
• It had it's own punishment in terms of public yawning at our posts

Because we are very interesting writers (*cough*) but not to the digg crowd and certainly not on every post. Our first 40 postings averaged 3 diggs each. I swear, you could scan your BK receipt, post it to "offbeat" and get more diggs than that.

But, not being totally oblivious, I started reading some articles on how all this stuff worked (or how people thought it worked!) and our average over the next 10 stories doubled to 6 diggs/story. Whoo, hoo, if we were a startup we'd have been worth $1B by then!

After a bit more attention over the next 10 stories we bumped our average to 24 diggs/story. From there our average over the next 15 stories went to 45 diggs/story.

Any my last story finally got "popular" and got 700+ diggs by this article.

Now, lest you assume I was spending my entire life on this, well, uh, no. I did around 70 stories over 7 months, or a couple per week. I was spending a lot more time digging (2,000+) stuff. A lot of that was shouts but a lot more was stuff I found by looking for people submitting stories with keywords I cared about.

So, to summarize, rocky start but a good strong finishing position, pretty good citizen. Maybe I give myself a B+, which would make Digg better than High School, in retrospect.

The Landmine Tripped

Not by anything I did outside the TOS, nor by a flame war, and not even by some self proclaimed Digg guardian. Nope, some sockpuppet knocked our blog out of bounds for Digg.

I posted a digg (Best. Digg. Shout. Ever.) about an absurd shout I got from a user called SteJules. I won't go into details but he'd been a Digg member for 31 days and had over 10K diggs and had a 20% hot rate. The shout was 800+ words and was priceless. It just begged for digging and though I was careful not to be ad hominem about it, I figured since he'd sent it to around a thousand people, I posted it. And it got 100+ votes in two days.

And it got our site banned by SteJules and his friends. Which is a long and boring story, but they did it on purpose by going back through posts from months before and burying them as spam. Nice.

Banning is Forever

Which is when I discovered that there is NO appeals process. You know how blogger will lock you out or require a captchya to post? Annoying but after a few days it usually gets put right. Google gives you a penalty, you can fix that in a few weeks. But no such process exists at Digg. (I actually have friends who know the guys what run Digg but you don't call in favors for stuff like that. Which makes it worse, actually.)

Being Innocent is No Protection

Oh, you say, you don't submit your own site and other people only do it sometimes. Well, what if someone creates a user, says that their home page is your domain, and starts, once a day, submitting your stories. After a few weeks they get their friends to swarm them and mark them as spam.

Bye-bye.

Diversify

Look, our business model does not require that we get traffic from Digg, but if it did, we'd be toast. We'll, we'd be toast unless we wanted to change our domain name, 301 redirect hundreds of pages, etc. And even then the "breathing space" only last until some other sock puppet bully gets you banned. So diversify into other social media sites. There are a lot of them, and if you read the articles under our "niche social media" tag you'll get a flavor for what is out there. In the meantime, while being a model citizen is smart, it certainly won't protect you.

If you would be interested in beta testing our new social media automation product before it is released, please drop me an email.

You should be

• An experienced Digg user
• Wiling to install iMacro for Firefox
  
• To spend at least a few hours using the product (My guess is that you will, like I did, fall in love with this product, so it shouldn't be too painful.)

We're very excited about how this will accelerate your ability to be successful on digg.  And if you're of an analytical bent, you will love what you can find out about your (and others) friend networks.

I was reading through the usual stuff this morning and hit this about a TechCrunch post that

ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users.

Yes, it is. Or would be if it were true.

Do Some Numbers

I always like to run the numbers up and down until I get something I can comprehend. I look at Alexa a lot for that - and yes, I know it is imperfect.

Alexa says that yahoo.com got 45,000,000,000 (yes, 45B!) page views last month. Holy moses, did I do that math right?

Alexa also says that google.com got 26,000,000,000 (26B when it's home alone) which is in the same ballpark, but who would have thought yahoo would have more traffic than google?

Wait, there are more numbers.

3% of the yahoo traffic went to the homepage - 1.35B page views.

16% of google's traffic went to their homepage - 17B page views.

Ok, that starts to sound like I understand the world.

(Side note, 20B mail.yahoo.com vs. 3.6B mail.google.com page views. Hmm.)

Drilling Down Into the Numbers

Ok, back to the 300K clicks/second thought experiment. If Alexa is right and 3% of yahoo traffic goes to yahoo.com and another 3% to news.yahoo.com then we have 2.7B page loads/month.

There are (30 days * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/hour) = 2.9M seconds/month. (Or you could google "seconds in a month!")

So, 2.7B page loads/month works out to around 1K/second for the home page and the news page.

I Call BS on TechCrunch Math

I dunno, if he'd said 300 clicks/second (which is non trivial!) I'd still have been impressed.

Now, did the story stay on the front page for an hour? That is 18K visitors, which is pretty impressive. Not 300K but still.

Don Is Smarter Than I Am

I asked Don to review my math and he pointed out that I just went the long way around the barn. If Yahoo could send 300K clicks in a second then that works out to 25B/day.

Another way to think about that: everyone in the world has to click on that story. Five times.

Compare Yahoo to 55,000 Digg Hit

I have this article on digg bookmarked because it is so well written and thoughtfully analyzes digg traffic, secondary spikes, etc.

And over a 4 day period he got 55,000 visitors from digg. He compares that surge to an earlier one where he got 0ver 40,000 visitors from digg.

How hard it is to get to the front page of digg versus yahoo news?  Easier, I think. 

Conclusion?

One thing we know is that digg sends traffic (a trickle, but still) forever on stories that get good vote volume. And you do get good feed additions too.

Now, if someone told me that Yahoo sent as many feed-friendly folks as digg I'd belive them, at least provisionally. But once the story is off the Buzz page I would be shocked if you continue to get traffic.

I'd love to opine on link love, but I don't have anything to base my opinion on. I know that is shocking on the internet, but there you go.

I started looking at this article to make sure my BS-O-Meter wasn't defective (it wasn't) but along the way I started to think about the relative size of social media "waves."

The otherwise very very smart Don Dodge posted this gem that gets some bits right:

I talked to a Facebook App developer at the ReMix conference. He told me his app is generating 300 million page views per month. Wow! Then I asked what kind of CPM (Cost Per Thousand) ad rates he was getting. He shrugged and said somewhere between $0.02 and $0.05 per thousand. That pencils out to between $6K and $15K of advertising revenue per month for those 300 million page views. Pretty good for a couple of young hacker/coders with very low overhead, but not the kind of business that commands million/billion dollar valuations.

Basic Assumptions

What I don't know about Facebook could fill Wembly Stadium with just enough room for a Flock reunion, so let's assume:

• This is app is at the median of the top 50 Facebook apps
• The actual income is at the top range of $15K/month
• The top app earns 10X what the bottom app earns and it's a smooth distribution

So, the total revenue for all 50 companies is around $12M a year.

No Money In the Ecosystem

Take these three data points:

• I have a friend who runs a three person shop that supports Cisco routers for a fairly large school system. He billed $3M last year. That is $600K/person.
• We work with a small Oracle outsourcing shop (5 guys in the US and 25 in India) that billed $7M last year. That is $230K/person, but if you cost average that by salary dollar the number is $700K/person.
• There was a local business paper article about a 12 person company that does custom Microsoft VP/Apps/whatever programming and just broke $7M in total revenue or $580K/person.

What's the point?

There is a LOT of money in the Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft ecosytems. I'm sure all three of these remora companies are too small to even barely come to the notice of Microsoft/Oracle/Cisco.

If any of them were doing Facebook work they'd be #1 with a bullet.

But I bet the 25th largest Facebook Widget Maker can get some 1:1 time with whomever they choose.

Let's review: $12M/year in the Facebook ecosystem and, what, a couple billion for each of the big three? Hmm, well, there may be a network effect from the users of Facebook, but the outside world is starving to death.

Wiser Words

Let's parse one particular part:

Pretty good [$15K/month] for a couple of young hacker/coders with very low overhead, but...

It may sound good to make $15K/month, but that is only a buck eighty a year. Take 50% out to pay for taxes and basic health insurance and you're making $90K. Hope you don't have any hosting or other costs....

So, really, it's krep income, even when you come near the top.

Valuations

The next bit is even more interesting:

... not the kind of business that commands million/billion dollar valuations.

Good lord, Facebook is "worth" $15B to Microsoft and a host of other people and it's certainly going through money like this bubble will never pop.

Let's look at the valuations of our ecosystem companies for a second:

• Oracle - Market Cap=$112B, Rev=$20B, Operating Margin=34%
• Microsoft - Market Cap=$280B, Rev=$58B, Operating Margin=40%
  
• Cisco - Market Cap=146B, Rev=37B, Operating Margin=25%

(By the way, if you aren't impressed with a HARDWARE company like Cisco having a 25% operating margin, you should be.)

So, Facebook is worth 10% of Cisco or Oracle and 5% of Cisco? I think we know that is crazy talk. But if that is the talk, then why is Dan dissing the 300M page views of a Facebook widget maker? Isn't Facebook just a bigger aggregator of page views?

Do Some More Facebook Math

What did Zuckerberg have to say about Facebook revenue on a con call in January of this year:

Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 million to $350 million.

Currently they have 450 employees, so this year their revenue was $333K/employee, which is not bad.

Next year they plan to have 1,000 employees ... yes that keeps their revenue/employee pretty much flat.

Remember the 25th most popular widget maker pulling in $180K gross/year? He's not looking too stupid, relatively.

How does this math work again?

Summary

There aren't very many people making money adding value to Facebook, it monetizes it's users poorly, and management plans to ramp staff and keep revenue/employee flat this year.

[Bump and update: two hours after posting and  we have the number one slot for our own  whois search.  Neat.]

This is not yet another weary re-telling of the Google Blogscoped article on whois this morning. I am sure our readership has an almost 100% overlap with the blogscoped guys. I am also sure that at least a few "SEO Bloggers" will duplicate the article with some added tips and tricks.

No, whenever I read a google "trick" or "feature" article I always use it on my site name and our key, er, keywords to see what will happen. I can't remember who suggested this to me, but I'm sure it was someone a lot smarter than me (that's a bit set!)

Whois Promote-My-Site.com on Google

So type in "whois promote-my-site.com" in google and see what happens:

Which is accurate and cool and handy - at least a dozen times a year.

But what struck me is that our site did not get even one mention in the results.

Hmmm.

So I tried some other SEO domains (seomoz.org didn't show up in the first two pages, etc...) and found that this is a common issue - lots of mentions of the site from other sites, but no direct link.

Then I bumped into seobook.com having the first four results. And it is because he has a "whois tool."

Not being entirely without wits, I immediately wrote this post about google's whois tool and what I found when I queried "whois promote-my-site.com."

Because now I'll rank with a good article on whois and how it affects my site. Assuming that there isn't some strange search logic going on in google-land.

We use filezilla as our Pointy Haired Boss friendly (*cough*) ftp front end. It rocks, and it is free - what more can you ask for?

Lately I've been testing screen capture software and have been spending a lot of time rebooting my PC (install/uninstall) and reconnecting to our servers, shoving a video up, testing it on several different computers. Rinse and repeat.

And it was really bugging me to have to change the destination directory to /home/pmsforms/images. Sure, it was three mouse clicks in a sea of other mousing, but my backbrain was telling me I was being a luser.

Timesaving Tip

Yeah, how stupid am I? Go to the File->Site Manager dialogue box, go to the Advanced tab and set the default remote directory.

Heck, if you have more than one directory that you use a lot you could create two different profiles that take you where you need to be.

Wish I'd thought of looking for this about a thousand mouse clicks ago!

Ever used Baidu? I haven't because, well, my Chinese is not much better than my French or my German. And without even cognates from five years of Latin to guess my way around a site, heck, I don't think I've ever used it.

And, yes, yes, I know that there are more internet users in China than there are people in the US, blah, blah, blah. I am focused more on the fact that my 12 year old makes more mowing lawns in a weekend than the average Chinese guy working in a factory for a month. And I sell stuff that doesn't cost a dime, so the vast masses of Chinese consumers are worth significantly less to me than they are to, say, P&G.

Logs Are Worth Reading

I was looking through our logs, saw a search string, and clicked on it. It turns our that we rank for:

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL. This e-mail address is not monitored

Which is the strangest search string I've seen in a while.

Wile there I tried searching on "Promote My Site" - we usually rank between 4th and 6th or so on Google, depending if Matt Cutts had oatmeal or a biscuit for brekky that day. Here is the result for that on Baidu (we are 6th):

Ok, the string they show is:

GOTO=http://technorati.com/blogs/promote-my-site.comblogreactions&&HREF:http://technorati.com/search/promote-...GOTO=http://promote-my-site.com/authtrans.php?authority_string={{!VAR1}} TAG POS=1 TYPE=DATA EXTRACT=...

Perhaps this all makes sense in China. But it really reminds me of the very very early days when everyone was switching from X to google and every once in while you'd get a result where you just had to scratch your head.

I think we forget how much better that all works now.

Well, not wrong in the sense that they are writing silly stuff (lord knows there is plenty of that in the SEO blogosphere!) but that they get the wrong end of the handle, as it were.

Article the first: Real People Don't Have Time For Social Media.

B: The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg.

Go read them both as they are frightfully well written and insightful, but ultimately not to the point I'd have made.

Here it is in a nutshell, though: People have to spend too much time on Digg and there is less tech news there.

Yes, yes, I know these articles aren't a pair, but they have a lot of similarities in their outlook on Digg/Social Media

Jumping to What?

 Ok, I think people often spend a lot of time "working" on things that don't have ROI. But even worse, they simply don't consider ROI or even measuring it. I might say they act in a tactical fasion with no linkage to a strategy.

Which brings me to the second part about Digg not being so tech friendly. I am not so sure this is true in the sense that it's permanent. We are in an election cycle and it's been quite a while since Steve Jobs came out of his hole, saw his shadow, and dropped a raft of fanboy flavored iPods on us.

But say it is so. So what? Does that mean that the tech readers aren't there anymore? Or that they are actually more interested or less?

Which brings me around to the "too much time" argument, which I still think is bad ROI focus and lack of testing.

So, while the articles are good, I would encourage people interested in social media to keep examining their overall strategies of readers, links, subscribers, etc, etc and not jump to any conclusions.

I was pondering yesterday's post about Mowser's demise and ran across an old (last boom) stack of business cards from VC's, startups, and "advisors." So I decided I would try a very unscientific snowball sample experiment and grab the top 20 cards and see what I came up with.

Winners

• The Monster Board Who? You know them as Monster. This card was pre-merger, so around 1998 I guess. Ok, they may be getting their lunch eaten by the hippies at Craigslist, but still. Big winners.
• RedHat These cards were right next to each other, so also a 1998 vintage. Shoot, another job opportunity worth $5M for just being there missed.
• Butler Technology Solutions I'll just give you the money quote from their website:
• "Winning in business requires solid strategy, steady performance and Yoga-like flexibility. " (I guess down-dog wins in the end.)
• Ultimus Still rocking good workflow stuff and have not gotten killed by the 27 different flavors of Microsoft and BPEL out there. High quality development offshored to Pakistan.
  

Alive

• NetCentrics Still doing the consulting and "product development" thing.
• ElementK Just not quite Special K but still around to provide IT training.
• NetGift.com Still loading, albeit slowly. There are generic shopping sites besides Amazon and Zappos?
• AccPac Bought by Sage.
• InfoTech Document solutions, bought by Ricoh.

Dead Pool

• MedicinePlanet.com Used to supply travel health information, now the website points at the WHO. I'm sure there is a story in there somewhere.
• OfficeClick.com Ten years ahead of their time, they had a hosted application suite for temps to use onsite for immediate productivity. I suspect they were killed by Office. Now their site points to dsl.com.
• PacketCom.com Site does not load, guess we didn't need yet another next gen telecom system after all.
• Poertera They used to do Learning Management Systems, now they:
• We create value-aligned business models with our clients that provide mutually beneficial financial returns.
  
• Infocruiser Hosting and dial-up (remember that?) internet. Site does not load.
• Nuforia They were new media before there was new media. Some shop in SFO bought the bones. I mostly remember them because they had these rounded edge business cards that made all the cats from Asia laugh. Long story.
• Opus360 "Staffing and training solutions for the digital age." And doesn't that sound Victorian now? They are long dead.
• YipiNet  Yes, "YipiNet dot com" - not all the terrible names are happening now. They had "online coaching for executives" in an age before the internet was pervasive. Dead, dead, dead now.
• nCommand Don't know what they did and their website has disappeared and the domain is for sale.
• Tandem Big computers for big money, bought by Compaq in 1997 (told you this was an old stack of cards!) and the domain isn't even pointed at anything anymore!
• Constallar Mega-ETL vendor, lacked tech to go with their sex appeal, ran out of cash, but threw great parties. Website dead.

Odd Ball Stuff

I don't want to make fun of people (google knows all, sees all) but I did run across

• A beautifully made card for a "Medical Intuitive-Astrologer." I am not sure what that is or where it came from, but I did sniff the card to see if it smelled like patchouli.
• At least a dozen cards from the late 90's with out a web address or email.
• Tons of cards with no cell phone numbers. Remember $600 cell phone bills for roaming in Philly for two days?
• My NEXTStep card stack. Sigh. Anyone want to buy a cube with an optical drive?

What's the Lesson?

Well, it's kind of obvious - the odds are stacked (30% win, 50% alive, 50% dead), even if you assume that I threw away the stupidest ones. (I did)

Here is the real hint: I pulled 10 VC firms and 10 Law Firms at random and they were all still in business.

Hmmm. Remember learning that the only people who really made money in the California gold rush were the guys selling picks and eggs? Still true.

I was reading a very sad, frank, and wise notice from Russell Beattie about the death of Mowser, his mobile browser project. I know, and you know, that most startups die young, the ones that don't mostly become zombies living on consulting, and the small remaining percentage are bought for peanuts by larger companies lusting after their IP and management team.

But it is still sad.

And before anyone misconstrues anything I am about to say, I've been there, so I am very sympathetic.

The Aftermath

I think Russell can say it better than I can:

Seriously... A salary will be a good thing to have again. I'm *thousands* of dollars in debt to my family and friends, maxed out on every credit card (all of which are in collections), on my last chance for my apartment (if I bounce one more check...), had my car repossessed *twice*, electricity turned off, cellphones switched off, landline canceled outright, and on more than one occasion (this weekend in particular) eaten little more than buttered macaroni as I waited for an overdue PayPal deposit to arrive (3-4 days? Come on!). Having a steady income will be a welcome mental break, believe me.

So, here's the thing, did he make a mistake or, even in hindsight, was this the right way to fund his company?

VC or Credit Card Debt

Well, that's the question, unless you're Guy and have been rich and famous for so long you forget why.

There is no answer. I know that's all very Yoda, but there it is.

The Third Way

Jeff Bezos is supposed to have sat down and gone through all the different items that could plausibly be purchased via the internet (pet food: no) and settled on books.

My last startup we went though a host of things we could startup that had serious FY money potential and that could be started while we were still consulting and earning our basic dough.

You see, we'd both done it the VC way and the credit card way and, since we didn't like the outcome of either, we went for the third way.

India

If I wanted to start a company without going into debt and without selling my soul to a VC, I'd go live in India and insource my project. 

A good mid-level manager who was willing to move to India could easily make $50K USD, which is the equivalent of $400K in SFO.

Take your partner with you, share an inexpensive room. You now have $70K to play with to hire technical people.

Which, in the good old US of A might get you a semi-palatable Flash programmer, but in India one can get a very good technical programmer for $15K.

Bootstrap four or five good programmers and be there to supervise them.

Plus, should things go badly, as they likely will, you now have an impressive resume to take home to the US.

You can rinse and repeat this process in China or Vietnam if you like, but I prefer curry to eel.

Keep A Stiff Upper Lip

Personal advice to Russell and everyone else swimming in the dead pool - it's all very survivable, and likely you'll take another run at the brass ring. I did, and I believe you can catch it if you work hard enough.