Can you give a breakdown of your current expenses?
Online Business Satire Magazine
The Onion Meets The Wall Street Journal
http://capitalistbanter.com/
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- Listed:
- Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:52:33 GMT
Accepted Payment Methods: PayPal
Description
Seven months ago I started a business satire site because I love business news and love making fun of it even more. The Onion never does enough business satire for me, so I built a group of writers and a site to get it done.
I love the site, but two things have happened recently to make me want to sell it. First of all, it costs me about $1000-$1500/month to run, depending on how many articles get posted. Like many of you, I have multiple projects going on and I need to funnel that money into one that has more traction and potential at the moment
Secondly, you can't build traffic to this site with search. For most sites, search is high quality traffic. For us, it is low quality traffic. Someone searching for "government bailout info" isn't looking for a satire piece, but may get sent to our site. That means you have build brand recognition for this business the old way, and can't rely as much on SEO.
I hate to see this site die, but can't keep putting resources into it. I think it has a ton of long term potential to monetize a Wall Street audience, but it will probably take 9-12 more months to get there.
I prefer to sell the site outright, but given my interest in it, I am open to selling just a stake in it (majority or minority) or even selling it for little up front cash and a percentage of future revenue deal. Keep in mind though that such a deal would require a legal agreement, real addresses, etc, and many of you who strive to protect your anonymity here at Sitepoint won't be able to enter into that kind of agreement.
The writers are all freelancers. I have cycled through many of them to find the current group. The head writer also writes Satire for the NY Times.
The site is on Wordpress, hosted at mosso.com, with a modified version of the Revolution News theme. It does 8-10K uniques a month. Stumbleupon and Reddit have been decent.
Here are some of the most popular posts.
McDonald's Unveils the Big Freddie Mac http://bit.ly/cb1
George Clooney to Star in New CNBC show "Hard on Cash" http://bit.ly/fUIO
CDC Warns of Octobox Overexposure http://bit.ly/wrYV
Revenue Details
We generate a little revenue from TLA and Adsense.
Traffic Details
Mostly direct nav and social media sites. We also have a twitter account that drives a little traffic.
Questions 3 public, 0 deleted
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:05:41 GMT
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Wed, 03 Dec 2008 13:11:30 GMT
I pay $15 per post to new writers, moving them up to $20 a post if they do well. I also pay a $100 bonus each month to the post with the most direct traffic. I have used different compensation methods with the lead writer, who writes almost every day and also edits the posts of others. He was originally on a per post basis, but last month I moved him to $1000/month flat fee for 20 posts a month, plus editing the posts of others, plus posting the one liner "headlines" on the site. So, for November I had expenses of
$1000 lead writer
$300 other writers on a per post basis
$50 hosting, miscellaneousThe cost structure is very flexible, and everyone is an independent contractor. So, if you wanted to make changes to the site but still have a little posting while that happened, without incurring too many costs, you could just move the head writer to a 2 post a week deal, let everyone else go on sabbatical, and could run it pretty cheap.
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- Posted by:
- Date:
- Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:43:34 GMT
Please verify access and attach site statistics, thank you.
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