Foreign Perspectives

Two years ago as I was promoting my free listings sites I received an interesting e-mail which demanded to know how I could possibly run the sites without charging for them.

In fact, it turned out to be from someone who was running a similar site which charged around £50/year for very similar listings to my own sites. That site happened to be up for sale and for a time I was quite interested in aquiring it but for various reasons that never came to pass.

One interesting point from that was that the profitability of his site was quite comparable to my own once you adjusted for the different number of entries on our respective sites. In fact, it appeared that the “free” model that I was using would actually be much more profitable than the charging model that he was using had simply taken over his database of expired subscriptions and put them on my own site as live “free” entries.

How can that be? Simply because I place adverts on my site whereas he didn’t and, of course, since my listings are “free” people go onto the site and never leave whereas he was in a treadmill each year to attract new entries to replace those that had decided not to renew. In fact, that lack of turnover means that my own sites will overtake the size of any comparable subscription based site sooner or later.

So are my sites free? I certainly don’t charge people for listings (though, for psychological reasons I quote a notional price). Yet I obviously get income from them so somebody is clearly paying.

In the real world there are usually limits to “free” services like this. The UK National Health Service has all kinds of problems in running “free” as people have a tendency to expect there to be no limits to what they should do, ignoring the fact that clearly the service isn’t free as it’s paid for in taxes. Yet, on the Internet, these limits don’t seem to apply: if I ever get to the point of having, say, 50000 entries on the sites it would cost little more to run than if I had 5000 entries.

Free, or rather ad-supported, seems to be the future for services on the Internet but I’m sure that many old-school types will continue to regard these with suspicion when compared to equivalent services which charge.

It’s back to school today for James which means that we’ve to start getting up at a fixed time yet again.

One of the oddities about this business is that there are no regular hours at all. During the summer we generally need to be up no later than 7.30am each day and often need to stay around the office until after 11pm each night. Once we get outside the peak period though there starts to be periods of a day or two when we’ve nobody in and can lay in a while and over the winter you often get stretches of a week or more at a time when you can take it easy.

Well, perhaps “take it easy” isn’t the right description as we use those times sans guests to get various bits of maintenance done, to catch up with the administration and move more into our little empire of online activities. Still, ’tis nice not to have both the early start and late finish for a while even if it is a little muddied by school days.

As always, the answer is “it depends”.

If your website is one of the majors, the answer is “probably not”. Would it really make any difference if Amazon decided to spend another million dollars promoting their site? I think not. After all, there can’t be many people around who haven’t heard of them these days and realistically nobody is going to buy twice the number of books through them no matter how much they’ve promoted the site.

On the other hand, if you’re like most organisations, essentially average then it probably does make a difference. Unless your name is very well known then you do need to invest some money in getting your site into search engines and perhaps also through PPC programmes such as adwords. If you don’t do that you run the risk of becoming an also ran in your business niche which was the fate of many small bookshops having an online offering at the time Amazon was launched.

Finally, there’s the special case of start-up websites. If you don’t promote them, nobody will know about your super-duper new site. For these, what you need to to usually is to spend a little at the start to get your site into the search engines to begin with (usually under $50 is enough) and start higher level SEO investment three to six months later.

What you’ll find after a while though is that, regardless of your level of investment in promotion, the traffic on your sites will grow over time. In my own case this growth is roughly 3x year on year which keeps things at a manageable level for me: the growth rate that suits you may well be different of course.

When you run a booking service, you get a strange perspective of the holiday booking habits of people which is generally at odds with what you’d think people would really do.

For instance, our B&B sites pick up a lot of traffic from around April through to August each year and outside that they’ve relatively low numbers of visitors. That’s understandable really as most B&B bookings are for just a few days at a time at most and you wouldn’t expect people to book short term holidays a long time in advance.

It’s quite different for the self-catering sites though. For them the booking season started just before Christmas and we’re getting so much traffic on the sites at the moment that it looks like we’ll need to upgrade the bandwidth next week. In fact, the traffic is pretty much as high as it was in the peak of the summer season!

As you know, we’ve been tootling along with over two hundred thousand readers per week, mostly via Reuters.

I’m sure that’s an incredibly misleading statistic but it certainly sounds good. What I didn’t know until now was quite how good it was in comparison to the competition as everyone seems rather cagey with their statistics.

Anyway, I’m dead chuffed to see this morning that I have both this blog and An Age of Magic in the top 100 of the Blogburst network. In fact Magic is doing rather better than this one thanks to an experiment that I tried a few weeks back which I’ll be building on here over the coming months.

Definitely a great start to the year for the blogs!