Monday, April 30, 2012

Another Week, Another Problem

Last week had some highlights, but also hit a major stumbling block. We managed to complete development for Mizozo, finally shedding that major daily responsibility, but just before that happened we lost our primary advertiser, Google Adsense.

With development over, we can now concentrate on various other methods for increasing traffic and attract more publishers. For traffic, we are asking many friends to help in the realm of SMO. We tried to establish a Facebook presence, but so far we are failing miserably. Twitter, too, is a failure, but that is more due to the fact that nobody we know is a real twitter junkie, so we have no good insight into that platform. We have managed some success in Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit and a few others, so we will likely concentrate our SMO efforts there. I expect that we should see substantial growth from those avenues this year

Now, onto more pressing issues ... Advertising. Last week, Google sent us a message stating that they will no longer send Mizozo and ads due to nudity within the site. As I mentioned several weeks back, we took measures on Mizozo to ensure that none of our articles with any NSFW content would show any Google ads. Unfortunately, this is a manual process, and with over 12,000 articles on Mizozo, it is difficult to say for certain that we caught them all. In Google's rejection email, they sent us a URL that they claim had Google ads. We have begun negotiations with Google to try and determine what we need to do in order to have Google start serving ads on Mizozo once more, but so far they are quiet. Hopefully, over time, we will be able to reinstate our relationship with Google. In the meantime, we have fallen back on our backup Advertiser, Matomy Media, and are in discussions for one more, while actively seeking out additional advertisers.

Such is the week in news for Mizozo.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Development is Officially Over for Mizozo (for the time being)

I am happy to announce that the final release of Mizozo has gone through and it looks like everything is working fine. We may have minor bug fixes here and there, but no new development is planned. This last piece that was just released was the profile page (ie: celebuzz.mizozo.com) as well as addressing a few minor bugs and issues.

This has been a crazy few months and I am glad that it is finally over. With development complete we can now concentrate on other site improvements, like gaining more viewers/publishers and fixing the static content of the site.

We are always happy to hear suggestions from our users, so please keep those coming. If you have other site improvements you would like to see in our next development round, now is the time to speak up.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Wrapping up development, Planning the next stage

Last week was supposed to be the final week of development, but due to unforeseen problems it looks like development will drag for another day or two. The new Profile page is almost ready, outside of some CSS work and a few minor issues that came up. Otherwise, it looks good and will be released this week. Likewise, we have identified a few more minor issues that will also be handled at which point Mizozo development will stop, and Mizozo Labs (mizozo.net) will become a hotbed of experimentation once more.

The next phase is a bit hazy, but static content seems to be bothering me the most. Much of the static content such as About Us, FAQ and the like don't make it obvious what Mizozo is about. Nobody is going to read the blog in order to figure it out, so we need to come up with a short and sweet way to present to our viewers the advantages of registering on Mizozo, hopefully leading to many more Publishers. We am regularly getting emails from people asking us to publish a story for them, which shouldn't happen if our business model was laid out more clearly. It is our hope that over the next few months we will find a way to make it obvious to the users what Mizozo is about and hopefully see an influx of new Publishers.

Another important aspect of running any site is to increase global reach, giving people a reason to visit your site. Having a reason to visit is important, but how do you get people to hear about your site? Well, there are two way, SEO and SMO. We have tried optimizing our SEO in the past, and much of what we did in the site's redesign was done with this in mind, however SMO (Social Media Optimization) is an entirely different animal. We plan to try and utilize whatever tools we can find in order to maximize our presence in Social Media and hopefully attract a large number of new readers. Our goal is to have 50,000 users per day by years end, hopefully each viewing at least 1.5 pages per average. While we are making strides towards this, we are still a ways off so there is much left to do. All those with ideas on how to reach this goal are encouraged to share.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Update on the state of Mizozo

Last week I had promised that I would give a list of all additions and changes to Mizozo 2.0. While a complete list isn't likely, I will give a partial list this week. Likewise, I would like to mention, that all outstanding issues with the new release, at least the ones we have been made aware of, have been addressed. The only piece left to develop currently is the new public profile page which is currently underway and should wrap up by weeks end, at which point development will cease for the time being. Its been a hellish ride, but we have almost come to the end, at which point Mizozo Labs will once again return to a state of testing various ideas.

To give a sense of some of the new things, here is a very brief list that is anything but a complete representation of the items developed.

  • New GUI - Anyone familiar with Mizozo has noticed how much the design has changed, this is a point that doesn't need much description. We have updated all pages except the public profile to this point, but that will be done soon.
  • SEO - We have taken steps in identifying SEO publishers and assigning them to our new SEO category which can be seen in the footer. Their articles will no longer appear in any of our main pages (Home, Category, etc), but will appear in searches for keywords. Likewise, they will be indexed by Google and other search engines.
  • Search - We have greatly updated our Search algorithm. While we are in no way comparable to Google, we would like to point out that this is in no way our goal. Our intention was more to improve our searching speed and provide a better means of retrieving Tags used in articles. For a good search of our site, use Google.
  • Memcache - Our rework of Memcache has reduced database load to a minimum. Once a page is loaded, it becomes cached, and until it is removed from cache its entire content is pulled from cache. PHP is still required to do a little reworking of the page at times, but this work is incredibly minimal. The fact is, the site currently works upwards of 200 times faster than before ... a moderate gain.
  • Unnecessary Feature Removal - One of our goals was to simplify the site as much as possible. Many features have been removed from Mizozo, like the Ratings of articles, the Poll module, the Quote module, and many more. Our intent is to bring Mizozo to its core, strip away all unnecessary code, then begin adding more refined modules to this sleeker core.
  • Advertising - We now have a much more refined method for placing advertisements, and the means to have a primary and secondary advertiser for our pages. Since much of our content can be considered Rated-R material, many advertisers don't like this so an alternate was our solution. So far, we have noticed an almost tripling in revenue in just one week.
These new features are just a taste of what's to come. Our goal for our Revolutionary Business Model, a socialist company where all information and revenue is divided equally and transparently, has only just begun. We still have a great deal more work to do for our users, not least of which is giving them a means to update their profile. 

So, stay tuned and give us your ideas. We have much to do, but thankfully a great deal of time to do it in.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Mizozo 2.0 Is Now Live

Mizozo 2.0 is now live. We are incredibly busy over here trying to get as many issues resolved as possible (lots of little problems) so there isn't any time to write a good blog post, but later in the week expect a post that will go over much of the additions, what has changed and where we plan on going next.

Stay Tuned ...

Monday, April 2, 2012

Mizozo's March Report

March has proven to be one of Mizozo's best months yet. With over a million visitors and over a million and a half page views, Mizozo is slowly making its way into the global market. The fact that we had a record breaking article last month shows heavily on our performance because that single article took in almost half a million page views alone.

Here are Mach's numbers:

Number of visitors: 1,155,835
Number of Pageviews: 1,572,867
Estimated Monthly Earning through Google *: $330.16
Monthly Earning through Matomy Media *: $34.01
Estimated Monthly Total *: $364.17

* - Estimated because Google hasn't finalized earnings yet.



We have yet to put together a proper report because we have been concentrating heavily on the new release. I hope that once the release goes out, though, we will be able to post much more thorough reports on our content and earnings, as well as detail expenses much more thoroughly. Unfortunately, this will have to wait a bit longer.

For those that are paying attention, you will notice that we now have a new advertiser, Matomy Media. After much searching, we have decided that Matomy is our best choice. They worked with us very well when filtering the types of ads we wanted, and their customer support has been incredibly helpful in configuring our account and explaining how they work. We plan on using Matomy as our secondary advertising source with Google remaining as our primary. Of course, this will likely change once we find people that are willing to pay us directly rather than go through agencies, but we are patient.

I would like to point out that we are planning on releasing the new Mizozo one week from today. This version will look similar to our current version, but much upgraded in style and composition. Likewise, there are many new enhancements as well as a much more optimized codebase.