Just got a huge buzz out of a hand reg....

[ausername]

I quit domaining a couple of years ago after picking up a domain that I didn't want to let go, decided to invest all of my time developing that instead. I only dabbled in domaining for beer money anyway, although made a couple of sales that allowed me to 'bank' a bit in the old stakeholder pension..... it was thanks to domaining that I got the bug back for developing though, after a 5 year hiatus (first Google panda obliterated my network of 5 page exact match domain sites, quite rightfully in hindsight but wasn't any consolation at the time!).

I've always wanted to build an Alexa top 50,000 website, decided I could do it with this domain in this niche (it would require me to be the 3rd most visited website of this type, I've just broke the top 200,000 and that makes me top 6).

Yeah yeah, Alexa is inaccurate etc (actually less true now, can explain why Alexa has a much larger sample size these days if you wish, the 'only people who have the toolbar installed thing' was once true, not anymore).

But anyway.... I'm at the stage where the hard stuff is out of the way now with that site, and I've just got to keep adding content regularly and sharing stuff occasionally on the social media accounts. So I've been thinking long and hard about my next project.

I just registered HOBBYforum.com (a hobby, not the actual word hobby). And trust me when I say I've registered that JUST as this hobby is booming. Like most of you I suspect, I look back at missed opportunities, e.g. wish I could go back in a time machine to when Bitcoin was $1.

Pretty sure for the first time in 10 years of full time internet work I'm finally going to be early stage / a first mover with the category killer. No time to waste. Here's the trend graph for the phrase..... current month off September peak due to it being a 100% outdoor hobby and the weather getting colder.

The subreddit for this hobby has gone from 5k to 25k subscribers in a few months.

Never thought I'd ever get this excited about a hand reg, well not since 2001 when Godaddy told me that Manchester.co.uk was available and let me pay for it, before cancelling the transaction because it had been registered since 1998 (never forgiven them, I was dancing around my living room for 20 minutes).

I mean.... its going to be a forum, which means its going to be tough to monetize, and there's still a chance I'll spunk £500 on a sexy xenforo forum with all bells and whistles and another £250 on facebook ads... and everybody will stay on Reddit....

.... but I don't care, its still exciting, and its a nice feeling to get excited about a domain enough to embark on a development project, after 4.5 years of post-panda depression which even saw me go and temp in a warehouse for 6 months to get away from the computer.

Sorry for the massive rant, you don't even know me, but people in my offline world wouldn't understand.

 

[Admin]

Brilliant post, loved it. More like this. Good luck with it. Rationale for not sharing the 2 domains..? That would be even better .

 

[dee]

Ha ha.... im sure lots of people here get that "rush" feeling. Good luck with it ! Would love to know the hobby.

 

[ausername]

OK, so I'm definitely close to being willing to share the 1st one on here and I'll come and do that soon.

With the one I hand-regged today, I've got a decision to make this evening about whether I register X extension and Y extension, after having picked up the .com and one other extension already, and don't want somebody quicker than me to get a product out like... next week or something... I'm slow and steady!

 

[ausername]

Ha ha.... im sure lots of people here get that "rush" feeling. Good luck with it ! Would love to know the hobby.

As soon as the site is launched I'll share it on this thread.

Just don't want somebody quicker than me to be the first one to soft launch on reddit.... could do that in 1 hour with a landing page and 'coming soon', enter your email to be invited to beta etc etc.. I need to be first mover. Sure you'll understand that one.

 

[dee]

With the one I hand-regged today, I've got a decision to make this evening about whether I register X extension and Y extension, after having picked up the .com and one other extension already.

Makes sense. I'd reg them for the sake of a few quid if you're talking about a serious site. You can always let them drop later , and if you ever decide to sell then it puts you in a stronger position as the competition cant get hold of them.

 

[ausername]

I just slipped over a dog piss on the laminate floor of my office and spilled a third of a cup of coffee on my keyboard, because I've been too distracted by absorbing information about forum software to remember to let the dogs out in the back garden, so that was a quick comedown

 

[scottmccloud]

There used to be a thread on here where people posted their hand regs. It was always interesting to see what people were having a punt on.

 

[dee]

soft launch on reddit.

You mention reddit a fair bit. I never use it myself. How do you mean a "soft launch " Is it something I need to be getting into ?

I thought it was all NSFW stuff and cat memes

 

[ausername]

You mention reddit a fair bit. I never use it myself. How do you mean a "soft launch " Is it something I need to be getting into ?

I thought it was all NSFW stuff and cat memes

Soft launch was probably the wrong phrase,... but somebody could stick a landing page up with a nice little logo and say "HobbyXForum.com, coming soon" with an email field.... post "I'm starting the first forum about hobby x" on a subreddit dedicated to hobby x for 25,000 people to see.... and could probably hoover up 500 or 1000 on a mailing list.

That's why I won't just tell you what the niche is. Well not you as an individual, but all of the assorted lurkers who who will be reading this forum frequently and wouldn't hesitate to do that.

But yes, Reddit is where all the millennials dwell these days.... well there and instagram. I established my current growing site initially by finding ways to spam reddit (by stealth). The links on reddit are also dofollow (pass juice) if you get enough upvotes, I think those links can be really powerful.

 

[ausername]

There used to be a thread on here where people posted their hand regs. It was always interesting to see what people were having a punt on.

I bet they aren't as bad as the ones you see on namepros. People seem to know what they are doing here.

I've registered some terrible handregs in the past, a couple of times I've cringed within a couple of days and just deleted them (can do that with .com's).

Currently really annoyed about a bitcoin domain that I grabbed from godaddy closeouts a couple of years ago and then sold for $120 though. Its an amazing brandable and I just know its going to be reported for $2000+ on dnjournal and namebio in the near future, bitcoin had crashed to about $400 when I sold it hence accepting the first offer that came along, silly me.

 

[dee]

That's why I won't just tell you what the niche is. Well not you as an individual, but all of the assorted lurkers who who will be reading this forum frequently and wouldn't hesitate to do that.

But yes, Reddit is where all the millennials dwell these days.... well there and instagram. I established my current growing site initially by finding ways to spam reddit (by stealth). The links on reddit are also dofollow (pass juice) if you get enough upvotes, I think those links can be really powerful.

totally understand reluctance to post domain. I'll need to check out reddit then. I was always distinctly underwhelmed by it all. Cheers for that

 

[ausername]

OK, so I'm definitely close to being willing to share the 1st one on here

First one is actually just a hand-reg brandable (like AcornDomains), its not like I'd picked up stockphoto.com or anything.

Watch documentaries

Sorry if that's a a big anti-climax, I get excitable

I started building a similar site in 2010, abandoned it a year later, deleted it a year after that. But I regret not persevering as I'd basically have DocumentaryHeaven.com by now if I'd kept plodding along, especially as facebook likes were so much easier to gain organically back then.... I'm finally getting 15 to 25 facebook page likes / followers a week entirely organically. Used to be so easy to hoover up likes (probably still is if you are willing to create cat memes every day).

Lost interest last time due to my thin niche sites being obliterated so deleted a few other sites and domains that I should have ringfenced should I ever have wanted to jump back in (e.g. like I am now).

I did however also have another small site which was dedicated to documentaries about drugs and ranked number 1 for 'drug documentaries', and to kick start this new one I migrated about 100 posts from there to this one, salvaging posts from the waybackmachine, which is why that's the largest category on this new site.

Now just publishing as frequently as possible to fill up those category pages, tag pages, and year taxonomy. Tags and years noindexed, but tag pages will be indexed if any tag grows to 24+ documentaries.

Its basically a never ending project to amass as many documentaries in one place and attempt to organise them in some way. Target is 10,000 documentary films, I'm 10% of the way there.

Ironically I've learnt that people really love Louis Theroux and Adolf Hitler, paradoxically... what with the latter wishing the former didn't exist.

I've also realised just how dead Google+ is, must go down as one of the top 5 biggest flops in internet history.

 

[ausername]

ps. I have software which tells me when a documentary is broken / source removed so I don't need a 'report' button, and also software which logs all internal searches so the user effectively tells me what they want to see on the site by searching for it.... e.g. A couple of people may search for 'autism' and I'll be like "yeah, I need more on autism" and go and publish a couple on that subject.

But I'm manually writing descriptions for these, tagging them and interlinking so its not like I can just go on a month long copy and paste binge to create a 10,000 page site overnight. Plenty of people try that (scraping or copy and pasting).... doesn't work out for them.

 

[ausername]

Ps. If anybody happens to be interested in case studies comparing actual traffic with alexa rank, this site is an open book on quantcast (quantified)

Here

By the way, based on current CPM it is highly unlikely that this site will ever pay my mortgage, more a labour of love. Current status is "a hobby site which is paying for itself", likely future status "a hobby site which pays for itself and a decent p*ss up once a month". Wish I'd built it in 2009/2010, because I could have made bank up to 2013 (around the time we hit 'peak ad' and adblocker became mainstream).

Sorry for all the text, at least you know Domain B isn't being shared because I'm ultra-private or stingy with info, I actually love sharing stuff when its not in the 'sensitive information' stage

 

[dee]

Nice site. Isnt copyright a major issue for you though ? I would have thought a lot of stuff must get stripped out on a regular basis.

 

[ausername]

Nice site. Isnt copyright a major issue for you though ? I would have thought a lot of stuff must get stripped out on a regular basis.

Depends what you mean by "copyright a major issue".

Its an issue in the respect that the youtube accounts of uploaders sometimes get terminated, and I have to find an alternative source (e.g another youtube or dailymotion channel). So the 'issue' is primarily a labour element, my software tells me when this happens, annoyingly another source sometimes never emerges.

Usually this is because somebody has uploaded 1000 videos and had 3 copyright strikes in a short period, meaning that all 1000 of their videos are removed. Haven't had many where the actual content itself has had a takedown request, it usually relates to the account as a whole.

I only stick with respectable sites which are likely to comply with DMCA / takedown requests, so the obvious candidates... YouTube, Vimeo, Veoh, DailyMotion, a few other outliers. Will never use the type of sites that putlockers use, 100% against those sites which hold content hostage.

But things have changed a lot over the past year or two on YouTube. Many content creators now submit a copyright claim for something they own but rather than demand takedown, they simply take all of the ad revenue into their own adsense account. The vast majority of documentaries won't ever be licensed again so it makes perfect sense.

So if I made a documentary and somebody uploaded it, I could file a claim and request that I get the associated ad revenue rather than the uploader.

Or I could choose other options, like allowing the documentary to remain, but with no monetisation. Etc, etc.

Or of course I could demand takedown, and give the uploader a black mark (which presumably people would do if they have an evergreen product which may get licensed again, or their own channel to monetise it on).

And more and more uploaders are actually licensing the documentaries from the rights holders. Here's an example of a YouTube account which is fully legal: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu4XcDBdnZkV6-5z2f16M0g

That channel licenses old documentaries, then monetises them... genius! And then I can embed them.

And there is this site: tubitv.com.... growing fast. Rights owners submit their films, then get a slice of the revenue generated from ad-rolls. I can embed them.

So its becoming less of a problem. Also.... so many documentaries made with kickstarter and indiegogo now.... the film gets funded, they make the film, pay themselves a wedge (they don't mention that, but clearly they do), sell a few DVDs... then what? They've paid themselves already, so they whack it up on Vimeo for vanity or as part of their portfolio. Then they control whether a domain needs approval to embed, or whether they disable embed entirely.

Its definitely becoming less of an issue.

 

[dee]

Interesting. I wonder what the tipping point is in terms of return on licensing. I would have thought income has thinned out a lot over past couple years. I remember reading that it worked out as roughly 1000 dollars per million views 2 or 3 years ago. Shame you cant get a slice of that somehow. I guess all your income is adsense.

 

[ausername]

As it happens I get a slice if the embed is from DailyMotion, and therefore that site gets priority over YouTube.

I'm hopeful that YouTube will wake up to the growth of their largest competitor and realise what is fuelling it

My revenue is roughly:

Adsense 70%
DailyMotion 20%
Amazon Associates: 10%

But there are improvements I can try here, at some stage I'm going to experiment with Amazon CPM ads and go with 2 Adsense and 1 Amazon CPM unit, instead of 3 Adsense.

People are seeing strong CPMs with Amazon CPM, which is fast growing.

I have one adsense unit on my video pages which makes 85% of the adsense revenue from those page types, so it makes sense to experiment with the other two units.

But like I said.... this isn't going to pay my mortgage, but its the site which got me interested again, so money talk isn't important to me. I run an ebay business, that pays my mortgage.

This one is more about other metrics. I wanted to build a high traffic site.... as we all know, high traffic and high profit are entirely different things and that has been true since day dot.... free desktop wallpaper sites and free screensaver sites were huge once, but I bet they never made anybody rich.

Paid ringtones however... probably a few ringtone millionaires from Nokia 3310 days with their premium rate text ads in every teen magazine (even magazines are dying!).

I also own LectureVine.com by the way (currently just a domain name) - So if we want to talk about money then perhaps I'm currently just working on a bit of a blueprint which I can copy to a higher paying niche

 

[ausername]

Interesting. I wonder what the tipping point is in terms of return on licensing. I would have thought income has thinned out a lot over past couple years. I remember reading that it worked out as roughly 1000 dollars per million views 2 or 3 years ago. Shame you cant get a slice of that somehow. I guess all your income is adsense.

Most of their content comes from one agency..... so perhaps they've cut a deal which sees payment based on performance? Or just a significant tiered discount based on buying X amount of licenses?

Stock photo agencies like Alamy cut deals with some major publishers which see them pay low rates for photos, but they buy in high quantity. Same with any product or service I guess? Always room for negotiation.

In fact wouldn't surprise me if Real Stories is actually RUN by that agency, hmmm... haven't explored that possibility.