1. It would increase engagement with users. I think they would finally understand how Twicsy could be an interesting daily destination because they could just focus on their topics of interest.
2. It would allow us to more easily control the content quality and guard against porn, which would hopefully get us back into the good graces of top tier advertisers, and allow us to target said advertising more easily. For popular verticals we could do direct ad sales which would be >100x more lucrative than the crap we serve now.
3. I think it would facilitate media partnerships. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but I think that if number 1 holds true that we could land partners for popular verticals.
The problems are that I basically ran out of time and money to be able to execute on this. I need money for a complete redesign to shift the focus to the topical verticals, and I need more time to execute on the back end tech to fill these verticals (maybe 2 months). I didn't need a ton of money, but even in this "easy time to raise money" I was unable to find an investor. I think the biggest reason for this is that I don't have a well rounded team in place, so part of this year I spent looking for a partner to focus on the business side. I was hoping I would meet someone that saw the potential as I did and believed we were right on the verge of something big. But I never found that person.
On repeat visits, yes the number of people that visit us just once is quite high. 5.8 million of the past 7.6 million visits were just one-timers. But there were over 350k people that visited us 9 or more times last month. And there were over 35k people that visited us 201 or more times. So that gives me reason to believe there are some real Twicsy fans out there! And, as I repeatedly say, we are succeeding despite the glaring drawbacks and problems with the site. Imagine if it wasn't such a piece of crap!