Thoughts on eBay vs Sitepoint?

On AWS it costs less than $200 a month to run.

Cherrypeel’s revenue was planned to come from a variety of sources;

-Selling music through iTunes,

-A for fee service to help bands get their songs listed on iTunes and other online music stores (Tunecore.com),

-Selling advertising space,

-Receiving sponsorship of specific events and competitions on Cherrypeel,

-Selling ‘sponsored artist’ spots to artist to help them self-promote,

-Future premium pay services for artists/record labels and content providers.

Whatever someone is willing to pay.

Do you have a ballpark figure? Is your decision to sell based on the work load or is it financial?

Thanks!

We don't have the time to dedicate to it. If someone has the ability to attract traffic to the site, I believe there is lots of potential to scale.

I am sure I'll be setting a reserve for the auction but until I figure out what the market is willing to pay for the site, I can't give you a ballpark.

I'd be happy to hear if there are further suggestions on how to create an audience for an auction.

Sitepoint website sales.

Also, this is not good: Our traffic has hit up to 75,500 monthly visitors, averages 40,000 but currently is at 6,000.

A potential buyer wanting to know what your traffic "was" or "once was" isn't something that should necessarily come up. I'd tell buyers your traffic is 6,000 uniques, and leave it at that. If they ask about the past use the 75K number then (and only to highlight the potential of the site, not what it 'once was'). The way it's phrased now looks like the site is heading south.

I know. Should I take it out or leave it in for full disclosure?

Definitely leave it in. Any serious buyer would ask for this info early along in the process anyway.

Leave it in for full disclosure.

A buyer would like to know that, with some media events, you can drive a spike of 75k visitors. A buyer might have some new ideas about how to keep them coming back.

More importantly, in one place you say the 75,500 figure is uniques and in another you say its page views. Which is it?

I should be uniques. I've changed it.

Thanks for spotting it!

Leave it in for full disclosure.

I think the purpose of these plans are to raise awareness in the mainstream media. This article is a good example of this tactic working. It doesn't matter if the decidion makers know what Twitter is, they know what newspapers are.

In Canada when the government introduced their new copyright laws about 100,000 people joined a facebook group overnight. Alone that group wouldn't achieve much, but all media picked up the "100,000 people Facebook group" and it was headlines for days, causing the government to backdown on the bill.

I do agree that if people want to change the world they should get out and do something to change it directly, but if they aren't willing to do that these small online protests still do affect the real world.

>The advantage of the download (desktop version) is that users can run in a borderless window with six color schemes and the ability to close the side palette.

Is this really an advantage? I'd want to confirm with potential users that they are concerned with color schemes (as I know I'd never pay for color) and having it in a borderless window as opposed to an additional tab in an already open FireFox.

You really need to define the additional advantage of the pay vs non-pay version. What is the screaming need in your users lives that paying $15 is going to solve?

I suspect some users might prefer a paid advanced version online instead of having to download a desktop app. You could either try a monthly subscription of $1 or a one time fee the same as your downloaded version.

To see which wording of "BuyNow" or "free trail" etc works best you should do some A/B testing using something like Google Web Optimizer. Hopefully it will speed up the process of finding the correct wording/strategy/layout.

I run http://cherrypeel.com and we are redesigning to solve a lot of the problems we had with people not understanding the site.

You need to have a tag line right at the top saying: "my website does X". Check out http://99designs.com as they do a great job of this.

Often people don't view the arrows as a voting button, so either change the icon to a heart or cute bunny etc or have some explanatory text describing how to vote or both. I've got feedback from people saying they thought the voting arrows were rising/falling icons, such as on the top 40 chart when they say; "this song moved up 6 spots".

People don't understand why they should vote. Explain that the more then vote, the better the site becomes for everyone. You might need to give people incentives to vote, such as karma, a level system or special names based on involvement.

Make the site look cute. The design doesn't say "this site serves up cute animals". I also wouldn't forward it on to my girlfriend as I don't think the cutness jumps out at you fast enough, which brings me to my next point.

What about having a preview function? There are lots of sites that have lots of cute pictures so why would I want to visit one that each picture is behind a click?

Have you check out the cute sub-reddit?

I got off topic but I hope this helps.

Thanks. I know the site design needs some work. The voting function needs to be explained and the preview function is on the "todo list". Thanks

Thanks for the tip.

Does anyone have good designs that stray from the general HN look?

I think Cherrypeel (my startup) is well positioned to help bands and fans connect. I wrote a response to this post here: http://cherrypeel.com/#p=/b/blog