I decided to update my media kit for Dream.In.Code today. My old one was out dated, and not very well designed. I went the PDF route and designed the entire thing in Publisher. When I got to the page with my ad placements, I had to decide whether to include my prices or not. Now typically, I enjoy seeing prices when I view a MediaKit. But I also realize that every situation is different and what may work for 1 advertiser, may not for another. So, I left the prices out and decided to go with the “Contact me for a custom quote”.

I price my ad space based on what I’m currently getting from TribalFusion or AdSense. So depending on the month, a spot may be worth $2.00 CPM, or $5.00 CPM. It also depends on what the advertiser wants. If they are looking for a long term campaign, then I want to work with them from the very beginning. So what do you think? Should a Media Kit include prices?

You can view my 2007 Media Kit here.

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

About a month ago I began noticing a drop in traffic on my programming site. It wasn’t a sharp drop, but a very slow decline. I didn’t understand why until I went on a business trip and had to use the hotel wi-fi connection. Every other site on the net was loading quickly, but mine was much slower.

After talking with a few of my members, I discovered I wasn’t the only one experiencing sluggish page loads, it was everyone. So, I began the search for a new dedicated server. The one I had was a Dual 2.4Ghz Xeon server with 2GB of RAM. There were about 50 other sites on the server including 2 or 3 large sites. The average load was 2-3. If you know much about servers, a load of 1+ will start to slow down your pages. I decided I needed a truly dedicated box, with more RAM, and faster hard drives. I also wanted something with RAID for peace of mind. Brian from HondaSwap.com suggested SoftLayer.com. They had a really good selection of servers, with RAID, for a descent price. I chose the Dual Opteron 248 with 3GB of RAM and 3 73GB 10k RPM SCSI HDDs in a RAID 5 array. Not much faster than my old server, but does give me the option to upgrade to the dual core Opteron 270 at a later date.

The server was provisioned a few hours after I ordered it, and after about 2 weeks of testing, I moved my site last weekend. It’s only been a few days, but I’ve already noticed an increase in traffic, page views, and ad revenue. What does that mean? Simple:

Slow Servers = Less Traffic, or more importantly, Faster Servers = More Money

The move itself is a totally different story. I had to mod_rewrite 220,000 pages and change the entire linking structure. Read more about that in my next blog entry.

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

I have recently had a reminder to do something on all my forums that I did long ago on Sprint Users. The welcome email that vBulletin sends out by default looks something like this:

Dear YOURUSERNAME,

Thanks for registering at FORUM NAME! We are glad you have chosen to be a part of our community and we hope you enjoy your stay.

All the best,
THEIR NAME

While this looks nice and professional at first glance, remember there is always room for improvement. Why not add a few lines with links to important forums, hot topics, or other interesting features of your forum beneath the nice welcome? The idea is that you want new registerants to become ACTIVE, so help them out and prod them in the right direction!

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

In an article at useit.com, Jakob Nielsen looks at lurkers vs. active contributing members in a forum or community.

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

Nielsen gives some examples of participation inequality in social networks, review sites, blogs, etc. But he gives some good ideas for how to overcome, or at least reduce, participation inequality:

• Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump through the hoop. For example, Netflix lets users rate movies by clicking a star rating, which is much easier than writing a natural-language review.
• Make participation a side effect. Even better, let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they’re doing. For example, Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don’t have to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system. Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple activity of reading (or using) something will “wear” it down and thus leave its marks — just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you prepare the most.
• Edit, don’t create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch. Editing a template is more enticing and has a gentler learning curve than facing the horror of a blank page. In avatar-based systems like Second Life, for example, most users modify standard-issue avatars rather than create their own.
• Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants. Rewarding people for contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don’t give too much to the most active participants, or you’ll simply encourage them to dominate the system even more.
• Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who’ve proven their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.

Out of this list, my favorite is “Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants.” There are so many things we can do for our users as forum owners. From reputation systems, to “kudos” like I use at dreamincode.net, to free giveaways. Even things as simple as member badges or titles can encourage users to contribute and participate.

You can read the entire article here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

Since my large forum upgraded from vbulletin 2 to vbulletin 3.0 in the summer of 2005, I’ve scratched my head over a drop in traffic. The numbers didn’t make sense which added to the mystery.

Registrations were just as high. First time visitors were just as high. All the stats that pointed to growth and healthy community seemed to be telling me that all was fine. But my stats for page impressions had dropped about 10-20 per cent. Instead of 50,000 page views per day (or more! Sometimes over 70K!) the page impressions showing up on Google Adsense stats and in my urchin had dropped to an average of 45K. It didn’t make sense.

I had wondered if we had over-loaded the pages with too many graphics, causing the page loads to be so long for many of our guests. Might be. I haven’t received a single complaint from a member so I don’t know.

I wondered about settings and would sometimes log into my admin control panel to stare at the settings, hoping something would magically jump out at me to tell me what happened in that upgrade. I wondered about the repeat visitors and the members who weren’t coming back as often.

One setting I found to alter was the “show number of posts” per page setting. Instead of 20 posts, each page would show 10 instead. This works only on those threads that are long and I only saw a small difference. Not even worth mentioning since we don’t have a lot of threads that are long.

The upgrade gave us some great new features as we had to spend 3 months re-customizing the software to add back all the special features our commumity enjoys. One of the features our staff raved about: content from the latest reply in a thread discussion in email notification. Several times our staff discussed the concern for this feature. On occasion when we had to remove replies, that content had already gone out to the members subscribed to that thread. We had discussed removing the content for that purpose.

But it wasn’t until I read Chris Kenworthy’s post here that I realized here was one issue that could make a profound difference.

Yes, I did it. I removed the content from our email notifications. It was an easy decision based on our experience with content being sent to members we had removed as inappropriate. It was an easy decision based on the many non-geeky women who join our website as their first online experience and assume their email notification is their one reply and they wonder why they don’t receive more. It was an easy decision to encourage members to head back to the forums to read their replies (more than one) and for the discussion to continue.

I edited the “language and phrase” email body for “notify”. It was easy and can be reversed at any time.

And yes, my stats are back on track which means a climb in revenue from advertisers and an increase in forum activity. Those members returning to read their replies may reply again or start another discussion.

Consider trying this out for a while to see if you find a difference in your traffic. If you don’t, you can always put it back.

by Kathy @ HysterSisters.com