How can we monetize this site? | Hacker News Reader

How can we monetize this site?

mybmore.net

38 pointsjzig18 comments

mybmore.net was an experiment made by a local Baltimore student to showcase the local flavor of his hometown. The site is well-liked among city business owners and school faculty, with the student now wanting to turn this into a real business. The question of how to generate revenue has been a challenging one. Traffic to the site is low and most business owners aren't willing to pay for anything. The videos were initially done for free since this began as a pet project. Any suggestions?

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It's going to be fairly difficult, but since you asked:

Step 1: Develop a sufficiently large following among Baltimoreans such that getting featured on mybmore.net meaningfully moves the needle for a business.

Step 2: Charge businesses who would not otherwise be featured in mybmore.net for advertising. You will primarily sell this in $X00 chunks via telephone sales reps.

Should you need good telephone sales reps, ask around at local papers. Their telephone sales reps are exactly who you need to make these sales, and they may soon be be urgently in need of jobs. Why? Local papers already operate on this exact model, and they do not appear to be sustainable, due to high costs and cratering revenues.

Local papers have a host of advantages which you will find it difficult to replicate, such as built-in bases of hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, irrational advertiser preferences involving overpaying for ads which are nearly untrackable and perform poorly, and cult-like brand loyalty which spans generations. Sadly, these advantages are not merely not in your favor, they work against you, because you will have potential advertisers say things like "Why should I pay you money for advertising to 100 people who we know see my ad, when I could instead pay 100 times more to advertise to 200,000 people who won't see my ad? I'm already spending everything I can afford on advertising."

There exist other potential business models for local-flavored businesses, but they'd involve you doing something more transactional in nature rather than creating videos, so I kept them out of scope for the moment. For example, one could -- hypothetically -- use the site as a portfolio for doing promotional videos of local businesses, and then charge them $X00 a pop for short 5 minute clips that they could e.g. upload to Youtube and thereby generate business from. For example, search for [baltimore hair salons] on Youtube -- now think of all the folks who probably should be showing up there, but don't because they can't figure out how to script, shoot, and host a four minute video showing a nice, professional haircut in a clean environment.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Patrick. Apparently the link description is missing so I'll reiterate some of it here. This was originally just an experiement/pet project by a University of Baltimore student to showcase local atmosphere with video mini-documentaries. However it has become popular enough by faculty and locals that the student decided to make venture out and try making it a real business. There are some design and seo issues that are known and can be improved, however the most challenging question was how to actually make this a revenue generating business. Interesting comparison to the newspaper companies and it is pretty spot on with what the Baltimore Sun is currently going through. Thanks again.

All good things started as pet projects...as long as you maintain an interest in building the community you should do fine. Sponsorships and ad sells will come naturally when you establish an engaged audience. Work on building up the content that you curate, and like someone else mentioned maybe use any video editing and recording skills that you may have to create your own video content and commentary, that will give people a reason to come back on a regular basis. Also you should have an email newsletter signup to interact with users when they're not actively looking for new info.

This is great advice. If you want to keep it exclusive and selective, you could ask customers to apply to be covered, part of which could include paying a fee after you vet them to your level of criteria.

Other angles you might want to go down is tying some special offers only to your site for the customer and seeing if you can do some (type of) lead gen for them where they might pay for access to that.

Great advice. One underlooked source for Step 1: Reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/baltimore

The Baltimore Reddit has 6,000 subscribers, which usually translates into 10,000-20,000 uniques per month.

If your content is good, it's surprisingly easy to hit the top of relevant subreddits. Just make sure to engage a bit with the subreddit by commenting on other stories and your own.

I saw this having created the subreddit in my niche, and regularly hitting the top of much larger subreddit's with casual posts (on another account):

www.reddit.com/r/LSAT

I spent two years operating, promoting, and working to monetize a city-specific site for Chicago called Windy Citizen.

We got the site up to 50k unique visitors/month within Chicago, and local advertising was still a very tough sell.

Eyeballs don't mean a lot for local. You have to build a brand and, more importantly, a community with a strong identity.

The three things you need are:

Events. Email. Web site.

Events are your main focus. If you can organize a quarterly event that brings out 300+ people at $25/head, maybe a debate about some local issue, you could build from there.

E-mail is how you keep in touch with people. You want to build a list of at least 20k people in Baltimore who might get a great local video in their inbox each day. That's a starting point.

The web site is where folks find you to join your e-mail list, learn about events, and browse some content.

You're not going to sell ads on your web site. It will never get big enough to create meaningful value in and of itself.

What you're going to do is sell sponrships that get a business featured at your next event, included in your e-mails, AND featured on your web site. You're going to offer them a ton of access to your audience. This is much more appealing to a local business than just web ads alone.

Check out http://Technori.com to see a great example of this. Seth started a site with some great content, spun off evnets that have gotten super popular, and has a great e-mail list that everyone gets.

He's building a brand, and eventually that will attract more and better sponsors.

And this is why you need to be lean.

A web site like this is all about brand and connecting the dots. But they grow slowly, so you need to run them for zero to no money initially. That pretty much rules out even AWS as a hosting option. You can host probably 10 of these sites on a cable modem like setup, or in someone's garage in a KS Google Fiberhood. But you when it grows you will need to scale it quickly to avoid a burnout effect.

So operationally you start with a plan to make something you can just push out static pages on a regular basis to a simple web server. Bring up thttpd on a Raspberry Pi and drop it with a baby UPS into a dirt cheap co-location facility. Your uptime won't be great but you will be able to pay all the hosting costs for a year with the sale of one advertising deal. Ultra-lean. When it grows you point your CMS at a bigger instance, push it, pop the DNS records and blam, you're at the next level. Rinse and repeat.

Now on sales. If you're going to monetize a 'city info' type thing to businesses the only thing that matters to small business is if they spend money and it is 'worth it' to them. The only way to prove that is to create a way for visitors to your web site to self identify at the small business. Ask for them to provide a way, such as a coupon deal that is only available through you, and give them the advertising for free until they get their first, second, or maybe third customer who walks in the door with your coupon. The more robust you can make it, the more they will understand what you bring them. Then come to an agreed upon rate. Price your service to be better than the local newspaper or the Yellow pages. But as high as you can go until you lose sales over it. You won't get a lot of deals early on so you need to leave very little money on the table.

Don't get caught up in the GroupOn/LivingSocial crap, just drive feet into their doors with solid discovery tools. Seek out the people who you can serve who have more specialized needs, like companies that want to recruit quality talent, like realtors who want to get first shot at the person relocating to the city, or even local governments trying to educate the community about their activities.

I would expect it to take 3 - 5 years. Yes, three to five. If you can do 10 of these in parallel it will be easier to switch to full time sooner.

10 years from now you'll be an "overnight" success :-)

Why not use http://appfog.com ? Save a lot of time and effort and it's free and ready to scale.

Off topic, but I went to AppFog, and the title says "The Best Public Cloud PaaS". What is PaaS? Why isn't that defined anywhere on the page? What does AppFog DO exactly?

I guess I'm not their target customer, but I develop web sites and apps for a living.... Bad marketing.

If I were you, I'd look at what similar sites in other cities are doing.

A friend of mine started this: http://www.altdaily.com/

They've been at it four years, and I know they've worked their butts off … and changed the model at least once. They've built huge influence in the community. I can get you in touch with them if it helps you idea-wise.

I heard the guy behind this site speak: http://rvanews.com/

Sounded like a similar, lots-of-work situation. It was borne of a smaller blog network, if I'm right. But they've gotten a long way.

A thought on the site's design: I like Jux as a platform for secondary (read: special feature) stuff, but you're really hurting yourself by making it a primary platform. One, it's very difficult to throw ads in, and two, while it offers a lot of creativity, you will feel somewhat boxed in because a lot of the design decisions have already been made for you. You should be making those decisions yourself.

FWIW, I'm familiar with the platform, and got a good number of visits from an interview I did with BJ Mendelson a while back: http://slides.shortformblog.com/465373

I did use ads in it, but I had to use some hacky techniques to embed them. (I also had to use hacky techniques to modify the CSS, but that's a different story.)

Also, understand your market: There are sites out there like Baristanet (http://www.baristanet.com/) and the New Haven Independent (http://www.newhavenindependent.org/) that have been mining this model for nearly a decade, and doing it well. Do your market research here, and see what they've done that's cool and interesting, and what can be easily translated to your model.

My suggestion: Don't be afraid to step back from this for a couple of months, work on the business model and start with a little more experience. It's way harder to get things moving without the business model already pre-considered.

Hope that helps!

patio11's idea is pretty dead-on. I would probably start there.

But for variety, I'll give you an alternative to the advertising route. You could do a procured tour that changes every week. Even long-time residents might find that interesting if you can manage to stay away from monuments and such.

So this week's tour might look like: 1. Start at a hole in the wall food place 2. Go to some art exhibit / outdoor concert 3. End in a less-heard of but fun night club

Charge X per person, make the group sizes small like under 8 people and it could be a way that locals do something social and fun.

Eventually, you would want relationships with the stops on the tour and get kick backs for it.

This doesn't scale in any way that would make a VC like it, but if you're looking for a small business idea I think that would also be fun to run.

I was an intern for a local web development company (in Baltimore) that tried this with "netneighborhoods.com" around 1999 - 2000.

Simply, the idea was to create a hyper-local business listing as a way of letting local people know about the local businesses. (The local businesses would pay for being listing, which was really a mini-website for the business.)

Ultimately it wasn't sustainable and only lasted - to the best of my recollection - a couple of years.

Providing a profitable service to local businesses and communities is very difficult. As others have said here, you're competing with limited budgets and high expectations.

Edit: Fixed a typo and added more content.

We have actually moved on from our original model because we realized that we did not want to be a business listing site.

The reason we started mybmore.net is because we love Baltimore and we feel that text and pictures dont do Baltimore justice. Videos give people the power to really paint the picture that needs to be painted.

About a month ago we came up with a solution as to how our company is really going to work and how it is going to be profitable. Currently we are readjusting our site to fit our new model.

I appreciate the support and advice.

I also encourage everyone to check out mybmore.net by the end of February and then let us know what you think.

And when figuring out "how many users is enough?" I think I would just use common sense and think about it like a business owner. If you had 100,000 monthly views or 16% of the Baltimore population could you charge a local business $30-$50 to advertise for a month? Absolutely and that would be pretty reasonable. You'd probably sell out quickly and be able to raise prices from there :)

Another option may be to become a 501(c)3 and get local/regional foundation support... I'd think as a for-profit the odds are stacked against you and you're dividing an already too small pie. Going non-profit flips peoples' attitudes quite a bit and you can still make money in the form of salary, etc...

Definitely an advertising play. Don't think I'd worry about that up front tho. I would focus on building a huge audience first. You didn't really say how many monthly visits you have right now, but really if you have the monthly views then selling advertising on the site would be the easy part.

There are a couple of "local website" groups in the UK that have generated websites for most large towns and cities (may be all, not sure). The seemingly most successful have taken on local reps in a sort of franchise system [that's the appearance from the outside at least].

How about a podcast (tour, presentations, you name it) and commercial activities within that podcast?

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