I Got My Ass Spanked By Porn
I think one of the things that has contributed to the popularity of GrownUpGeek.com is how we’ve always (well, usually) given members what they want – either by following their suggestions or adding more content for what we were seeing searches on, etc. By doing this the website has taken on a life and personality of it’s own, resulting in a website that’s 99% different from what I envisioned when I created it just over two years ago.
Now that premium membership subscriptions are (by far) generating more income than advertising ($4,700 in Dec 07, $3,700 in Jan 08, and over $2,500 in the first 15 days of Feb. 08) I’ve been trying to maintain/increase premium membership the same way, by giving (premium) members what they want. The goal is to have more new subscribing members each day than members that cancel their paid-subscription. Bearing in mind that not only do members cancel for whatever reason, but we also get several automatic cancellations each day due to problems with PayPal accounts, credit-cards, etc – keeping a positive-member flow is a difficult job, and if members don’t get value for their money, they wont stick around.
So this weekend in an attempt to add-value for our premium members we created a few new “premium” forum areas based on member-suggestions. One of those new sections was an “adult” content area. The idea is that it would be an area with no rules where premium members could discuss ‘adult’ topics that might not be appropriate in any existing areas. It seemed like such good idea in theory.
Within minutes of creating the new Adult Geek forum section, there were posts ranging from “women that squirt” to “fishys“. Not that these aren’t great topics, but since part of my SEO strategy is to heavily interlink all pages with “recent comments” and “new topics”, anyone with a premium membership could click on one of these recent comments or new-topics links and be taken to a page that might surprise them.
Within an hour my inbox was filled with scathing, thought-provoking complaints from members that had no interest in seeing this type of content.. Even though many members loved it, just as many hated it – with a passion. I guess with over 1,000 premium members this is to be expected. I quickly made the forum section “Opt-In” by adding a new Drupal role for “adult content”, and assigning the proper category permissions. This allows only members that have opted-in to see the adult content to view the forum section or any recent comment links and new topic links to content posted in that area. I should have done this from the start, and looking back, this is probably one of the biggest screw-ups at the website I’ve made so far.
It’s been two days since I made this tremendous fuc&-up and I’m still seeing the repercussions in the form of complaints, members or moderators calling-out other members as hypocrites for requesting (or not requesting) access, the list goes on and on… Since I try as hard as I can to keep everyone happy, it’s been a loong weekend. Although the fact that Monday is a holiday making the weekend three-days long might have something to do with that..
I’ve decided that I’m not going to keep the new “grown up” area, because too many members have complained – man, porn really spanked my ass!
So adult sites do get more traffic
I guess that this is indeed a world with more and more aggressive spammers. I think I’ll keep the woesie website I have
That fishys link surprised me!
Poor little fishies, what a way to go.