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dumbfounder

For those interested (notlisted appears to be!) here are some actual numbers from Google Analytics for October:

Unique Visitors 6,461,357

Visits 7,592,870

Pageviews 28,461,178

Avg. Visit Duration 00:02:07

Geos

USA: 1.6m visits Indonesia: 687k Japan: 569k not set: 513k UK: 369k Mexico: 261k Turkey: 247k France: 232k Germany: 213k Spain: 185k

And an amazingly long tail from there. So that is definitely part of the problem when it comes to monetization. There are 120 different countries that had more than 1000 visits in October.

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I do not actually believe that rss produces a significant amount of traffic for Twicsy. I don't see any evidence in the stats it has much of an impact at all.

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I am. Like digging through analytics. Some people pay me for it (not a hint, just a fact).

I feel something is missing in this story...

Google has very few sites linking to yours (~35 pages, mostly garbage pages), reports a huge number of indexed pages, but actually shows very few. Why? Hummingbird update or something else?

A search for Twicsy links in twitter finds hardly anything, except the site name in combination with a link to http://po.st.

You have 30k followers on Twitter, quite a few but not humongous, so your top trend tweets won't generate major traffic. 24k on FB, but most status updates get little or no comments, likes or shares.

I see a bunch of twicsy-'hosted' images on pinterest and tumblr. Most PG-18 search terms on your site are blocked, but when I do a google image search or twitter search, quite a few, I'd say 1 in 20 are of an adult nature (which perhaps doesn't help in terms of getting advertisers).

Is the real reason for your success & traffic really... pr0n?

Edit: One of the reasons I ask this is the source of your traffic. Would visits to your site allow Indonesians to bypass their 1MM site pr0n filters?

hmm, you've reaffirmed my suspicions. The image suggestions for a google search of Twicsy was just adult material.

The TechCrunch article in 2009 criticised the website for being creepy http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/19/twicsy-is-a-killer-and-kind...

"As you might imagine, this service pulls up a lot of slightly personal pics, such as couples being all cutesy together. Since you don’t know any of them, it’s slightly creepy. But hey, if they don’t want those seen, they shouldn’t be sharing them over Twitter in the first place."

I regularly review the most trafficked pics on Twicsy and my rough estimate is that about 10-15% of the traffic is porn. But it is hard to know exactly because there is such a long tail of activity. My theory for why the associated words are usually porn is that there is less of long tail of activity when it comes to porn searches than regular searches. It didn't use to be this way, I think that 2 years ago roughly half the traffic was porn and when I realized this I was quite disheartened. I started taking aggressive steps to remove it and mitigate it and traffic suffered for a while, and I thought that was the end of Twicsy. But it bounced back after a few months and kept slogging on...

I would bet the top search on google is something simple porn related like "sex" similar to Twicsy. But that doesn't mean google is a porn site that no one should advertise on.

I'm not blaming you in any way, nor do I have a moral issue with it. I suspect the percentage is higher though...

As you indicate advertisers have a major issue with it. The site being what it is, a search index of unfiltered twitter picture streams now hosted on your servers, you probably can't prevent it either… Severely impacts your ability to make money on it, unless you were willing to go over to the 'dark side' and get 'content-relevant' advertisers… (don't ask me how they make money, it's a mystery to me, I've never paid for it)

Sorry, didn't mean to sound defensive :)

The problem with "going to the dark side" is that I would be serving porn ads to all the Justin Bieber and One Direction fans in the world as well as the porn hounds. That would just be plain wrong.

Great research. Now its not difficult to see why the traffic can't be monetized.. The traffic stats looks way off and not organic.

I just looked how much we made in Google Adsense in Oct based on the number of unique visitors we received. I calculate that we would have made roughly $42K in Oct based on your unique visitors value. This sounds nonintuitive, but its my opinion that you actually have too many ads on your site to make any money from them. My site is fotoblur.com. You can reach me through the support page if you'd like to chat. I'd love to help you if I can.

Really like fotoblur.. amazing

Forget Twitter Bootstrap, if people cared what a site looks like - explain Craigslist..

You may want to rethink the ads on the home page. Text link below the banner center, remove the image boxes. You should be getting at least $3-4 per 1k imps. Maybe dropping the 'no ads when sign in'. Show ads to everybody, but very few ads. 1 per page, maybe 2, but that's it.

How much money does Craigslist actually make, though? Also not every Bootstrap site has to look Boostrappy, people just almost never bother to change the colors at all.

I agree with moving the ads though. Users who've shown enough interest to click into a page might be more amenable to target advertising.

Craigslist makes somewhere in the range of $100-150 million a year, they charge $25-75 for job ads in major markets and $10 for broker-listed apartments in NYC.

Oh, wow. I honestly thought it wasn't profitable for some reason... thanks.

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