So, I soft launched my economic and financial social news site, http://Newsley.com two months ago. So far, I've had around 500 uniques and I've served around 2000 pages. I'm fairly happy with that start, but I have no idea what to expect in terms of traffic and growth. The vibe that I get is that at some point, the site will reach a critical mass, and then the community will take on a life of it's own. How long does it take to get to that point? I know sometimes it's never. I'd love to hear some anecdotes from people in similar situations.<p>My guess is that it takes about a year. I've been looking at the internet archive of Reddit: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://reddit.com and it seems like it took them about a year to have people comment on articles on a regular basis.<p>I'd love to hear some thoughts, experiences, from people who were in similar situations. And, any tips along the way on getting to the first 5k users, would be greatly appreciated.
Well, posting this here will definitely generate a bit more traffic for you.<p>I've been looking for an economics-centered version of HN for the past few weeks, and seeing as how newmogul isn't being run anymore, your site becomes an appealing candidate. However, the design makes for a somewhat unpleasant experience, so a few suggestions would be to back off the italics and big bolding, go for sans-serif fonts, and color some of the supplemental informational text lighter shades of gray because with everything just black now, the site looks too noisy.
I'm curious what the monetization strategy is for these types of social news sites (ex. Newsley, Rubyflow, markenomics, etc., etc.). Or is the motivation to do the work to build this type of site (both structurally and in a community sense) born out of strong interest in the subject and perhaps the chance of potential indirect future rewards (networking, jobs, etc.).<p>I ask because I'm interested in a couple of other subject areas and considering building a similar style of site and thus wondering what realistic expectations should be re. the potential for direct monetization.
I launched RubyFlow - a public link blog for Ruby stuff - on April 9, 2008. On the same day, 3 other people posted items. The next day, about 10 others. This kept up for a few weeks but it died down a lot so I picked up the slack, did more promo, and since late 2008 it's basically run itself.<p>The trick? Have a popular site in the niche you can use to promote the heck out of the new site ;-) Stack Overflow is a great example of this technique working on a bigger scale.
Well according to Quantcast, this site now only gets 5.9K US visitors a month, so you might not need even 5K to have a decent site. At its peak HN got around 17.4K.<p>Showing the summary of the story is a REALLY good idea. It's also cool that it gets the summary for you, and you can change it if you want. The font is a bit cramped-together and small. It's pretty unpleasant to look at. What is your bounce rate? I think changing the font to make it initially more comfortable to look at might improve your bounce rate. I don't mean serif to sans-serif. Your font is so serify that it looks italicized. There are lots of lighter serif fonts.