Monday, July 23, 2012

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Its been a relatively uneventful few weeks here at Mizozo. Everything is progressing as usual, but there isn't a great deal to report on. The Stumbleupon Soft Ban has been painful, to say the least, but such is life. Similarly bad, one of our advertisers pulled much of their ads, so our revenue has dropped as well. Regardless, we chug along.

It is our hope that come New Years things will change. We are still slowly putting into place the next phase of Mizozo's growth, that being sharing our revenue with all publishers. We assume that this will encourage more publishers and thus lift Mizozo's rankings, but that is left to be seen. None the less, we are chugging away as usual in the hopes that our Revolutionary Business Model will prevail and that our Socialist Company will change the way business is done.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Until Further Notice

After some thought, a bit of discussion, some heated arguments, more thinking, further arguments, a bit more discussion, a bit more arguments, a few fists, some biting, more thinking, more discussion and some more serious thinking ... it has been decided that Mizozo will cease providing an article copying service for its members. This has actually been a service that wasn't advertised, so most of you were probably unaware, but anyone who was paying attention could easily see that every morning a series of articles were copied from other sites onto Mizozo with a link back to the original article.

The reason for this is simple, Google (as do most search engines) detest repeat content. We have been aware of this, and due to our lack of original articles we had previously decided to post other people's articles on Mizozo. We immediately noticed that search engines weren't indexing these articles, but people visiting our site would click on them occasionally which, again we thought, was keeping people interested in our site. Well, after repeatedly being told that this was a bad idea, we finally changed our minds.

As of today, Mizozo will cease to copy articles from other sites. Likewise, we have asked all publishers that were doing so themselves to stop. We will not force anyone to stop, we are for an open platform, but if we notice it repeatedly we will simply mark the user as SEO.

I would like to point out that before making this decision, we had done a quick brainstorming session on how to keep these articles on Mizozo so as not to negatively impact our own SEO. We don't have a final solution yet, but several options are available. We will be returning to this in the not so distant future with a better mechanism that will likely be substantially more beneficial to other site owners, slightly more beneficial to our users, and likely not beneficial at all to Mizozo as a whole but we will do it anyway.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Soft Banned on Stumbleupon

In the last year, much has changed at Stumbleupon. For starters, they have become far stricter in their rules on submission, seeking out spammers with a vengeance. More importantly, they drastically changed their algorithms keeping individual sites from raking in tens of thousands of clicks a day (theoretically doing a better job at distributing traffic among the smaller sites). Mizozo has definitely felt the difference ever since their algorithm change, but now it seems that we have likewise been classified as spammers.

While we have been very careful not to submit more than 2 or 3 articles to Stumbleupon a week, someone at SU headquarters has decided to Soft Ban us (or so it seems). For the past 3 weeks virtually all traffic from SU has dropped to next to nothing (about 50 clicks per day), all the while averaging thousands of clicks per day for the last year or two. While this is a noticeable drop, and painful when it comes to advertising, much has been learned which I would like to share.

For starters, let me point out that there is no direct evidence of this soft ban. We are simply running on assumptions made by speaking to other site owners who have experienced the same thing. While we don't really care too much, several people went directly to SU's higher chain of command looking for answers, and they didn't like what they found. Likewise, it is possible that over time SU will lift their ban, something that we are not at all knowledgeable about. From what we learned, when SU bans a site they stay banned, but only time will truly tell.

When SU commits to soft banning a site, they are very quiet about it. Even confronting them with questions like, "Why have you stopped sending traffic to my site" returns answers like, "Nothing has changed here, people probably just aren't liking your links" (I will copy my question to them and their response below). SU is very secretive about their inner workings, which makes sense. It is completely opposite of what we at Mizozo are trying to do, but its their decision.

What we learned from this is very simple, never rely on Social Media to attract visitors. Most good visitors come from search engines or natural referral links. As an example, the average SU referral clicked about 1.15 pages, while the average Googel referral clicked about 2 pages. While this may not make much sense to the non-blogger or non-siteowner, it makes quite a hefty difference. Even natural site referrals average about 1.7 pages per user. There is worse than SU, however, and those are sites like Reddit. While Reddit isn't that much worse than SU, it is noticeable ... just below 1.1

So, what does this mean? It means do not rely on SU for your traffic, and don't try to encourage any Social Media to your site. Of course, once in a while is fine, but it since it isn't stable you can't rely on it. To keep Social Media pointed at your site on a daily basis requires a full time employee, and in the end your site will become banned. While it is unclear why SU banned Mizozo considering how infrequent we submitted articles, it seems that they felt the need to do so and there is nothing that we can do about it. If you as a site owner spend more time generating unique and interesting content, you will get a great deal more out of the effort in the long run.


For Reference: The following is my initial email to SU followed by their reply.

Me:  
Hi There. As of last week, SU more or less stopped sending traffic to my site, mizozo.com. Has something happened with regards to my site? I have been very careful not to submit links to my site often (two or three times per week), as stated in your answer to "Can I use StumbleUpon to drive traffic to my web page?". Did I do something wrong? Maybe someone else did something wrong? Can this be reversed?

Stumbleupon:
Hello,
The site you inquired about is not blocked on StumbleUpon. You can verify if a site is blocked by clicking on the Info/speech bubble button on your toolbar while you are visiting this page, in order to get to the URL review of the page. If the site is blocked, you will see a message saying that this site is currently not available for rating or review.
As mentioned in previous correspondence, we cannot guarantee traffic. StumbleUpon's recommendation algorithm is extremely complex and we are not at liberty to say what may or may not have effected the traffic to your site. The only insight we can give is that it is dramatically driven by the Likes and Dislikes of our members.
I'd suggest reading this blog post "What Makes for a Great Stumble": http://www.stumbleupon.com/sublog/what-makes-for-a-great-stumble/
We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause, but there is nothing more we can do than provide the information given in this and our previous responses.
Best,
Adrian
StumbleUpon Community Advocate

Monday, July 2, 2012

Mizozo's June Report



With June finished, we have reached the halfway point of 2012. Continuing with our Socialist tradition of being a completely transparent company, we will give you a brief summary of last month's earnings, visitors and the top 5 articles of last month. This month I will also add a list of top 5 articles that were published last month.

Here are May's basic numbers:

Number of visitors: 700,100
Number of Pageviews: 1,144,640

Monthly Earning through Matomy Media: $89.52
Monthly Earning through Adcito: $219.04
Monthly Earning through 3 Interactive: $296.34
Estimated Monthly Total: $604.90


It is interesting to note that on the surface it looks like our visitor count increased as well as our earnings. While both are true, these numbers are a bit misleading when looking at them from the perspective of an entire month. In fact, we started June very strong with high visitors, but as of just over a week ago we lost one of our biggest traffic sources, Stumbleupon. Since then, our numbers fell substantially. While we aren't sure what happened yet, there will soon be a follow up article with assumptions and concerns.

At the same time, though, our earnings grew a bit. The fact is, at about the same time we lost Stumbleupon, 3 Interactive began sending us some great advertising campaigns which shot our earnings through the roof. They haven't paid us yet, so things may change, but our CPM for the end of the month was at about $1.20, which is incredible. So, the fact we lost a few thousand hits from Stumbleupon really doesn't matter when taking into account the fact that our CPM increased by almost 6 times.

We will follow up the Stumbleupon and earnings change with an informative article soon. I will go into a bit more detail as to how our earnings are calculated and potential future changes to earnings. We have a new advertiser on board which we haven't started yet, and one of our advertisers is having reservations about some of our content, so things may change quickly.

Before we sign off, here are the Top 5 articles for June, followed by the Top 5 articles published in June.

Top 5 Articles for June

#1 - The Bizarre Humor of Reddit (84,400)
#2 Jelena and Viktorija Miksa: Topless female Croatian fans get into trouble! (65,400)
#3 Kelly Brook goes completely nude for Exhibition Magazine (26,000)
#4 - Irina Sheik Photos, Gods Gift to Man (20,700)
#5 - Mizozo Home Page (19,800)

Top 5 Articles Published in June


#1 - Jelena and Viktorija Miksa: Topless female Croatian fans get into trouble! (65,400)
#2 Kate Upton Goes Topless for GQ Magazine (19,000)
#3 Miranda Kerr Goes Nude for Photographer Chris Colls (14,400)
#4 Candice Swanepoel Is Completely Naked In Muse Magazine (11,200)
#5 Jersey Shore's Snooki's nude picture surface online! (11,100)


We absolutely love seeing our homepage hit the top 5 most viewed pages, so keep visiting. In case you didn't know, the homepage updates every 30 minutes reorganizing itself with the most popular stories at the top. The more often you visit, the more likely you will get to catch the hottest stories of the day.