posted by max on April 30, 2007 at 10:54:49 PM

A lot has happened since I started YTMND over 3 years ago. I've seen a group that started with barely ten people form into a massive community of hundreds of thousands. Watching this site has altered my stance on life and my values significantly.

When I originally decided to make the site, I had no plans for any sort of moderation, rules, or limits on anything. Ever since my encounter with Dustin Diamond, I've valued free speech as a vital piece of a functioning society. I think very rarely do the "limits" on free speech get truly tested and as a 21-year-old having a problem with authority it was pretty easy to naïvely think that speech should be truly free and there was never a need to censor anything. Censorship is just one of the love/hate relationships YTMND has required me to have. Advertising is another.



Recently there was a big uproar about the YFLY corner image which was somewhat expected but overall disappointing. If you feel that after running this site for three years I have yet to acquire the business acumen to know when YTMND staying alive for another month is worth a small sacrifice, then you should just head out now. I'm not doing this to pay for gas for my Ferrari. I'm doing it to keep the site alive. As long as you don't believe that, you are only hurting the community by complaining that the free service you get isn't free enough.

I felt compelled to write a synopsis of YTMND's struggle to stay alive over the last few years. It's long, but I think it should clear up a lot for people who care in the least.

History

YTMND opened its doors in April of 2004. After about three months of running the site and some brief fame, it was pretty clear there was no way I could keep running the site as a hobby and paying for it out of my own pocket. Due to the fact that Ridin Spinnas was one of the most highlighted pieces of content at the time, putting up advertising was pretty much out of the question. So what did I do? I turned the site off and went back to my life.

When I first made YTMND, I didn't even envision a community. I never thought YTMND would become a "portal"; I figured people would come here, make a YTMND and then send it to their friends or post it on forums. I didn't think people to actually visit YTMND to see new content. I never expected it to be a destination, only the host of some creations people would see in passing. Obviously that assumption, like many I made during the creation of the site, was pretty far off target.

A few months later, I get a message from an acquaintance who owned a hosting company called Reflected. He told me he missed the site and would be willing to host it pro-bono if I thought I could manage to become a paying customer some day. I thought it was a long shot, a really long shot. How would I, someone who has never made a commercial website or product that turned a profit, manage to turn YTMND into a revenue-generating business?

I figured "what the hell?" and accepted his offer. I started to contact various ad networks and signed up for Google Adsense. I obviously couldn't put ads on the actual sites due to the content being so varied, and I knew advertisers wouldn't want their ads on Ridin Spinnas. I controlled the content on all of the www pages except for the site titles and comments, so I figured ads on those pages would be fine.

I have always designed the site for myself. I occasionally cater to requests from users, but for the most part, the features I work on are things I think I will use often or will be pleased by what they result in. I'm a typical web user. No one likes pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-overs, interstitials, forced viewing of ads etc; it's annoying and in most cases greedy. I try and avoid a site if they have pop-ups, even if they are blocked., I don't visit sites with intrusive ads, and if I'm making a site, I'm going to make it pleasurable enough to use that I'd visit even if I hadn't made it. So I had to figure out a way to put ads on the site without being too intrusive or causing me to feel horrible guilt.

I've strived to keep the actual sub-domains of YTMND as clutter free as possible. I want people to focus on the content when they view a YTMND, not the navigation or the advertising. The only reason I even switched from the # ! system to the corner image was because I got a higher resolution monitor and the exclamation point was starting to get hard to click. Granted, it wasn't bad for brand recognition either. I got the idea after I saw a corner ad with the same dimensions on the right side of an article on the Wired website.

So I started up with Google as they were the only ones who didn't immediately deny my application. In a short period of time I started getting a lot of email about policy violations. Google law says you may not have content that breaks their terms of service anywhere on your domain.

This is about the time I came up with what I call:

The "Ridin Spinnas Rule":

The first principle is to avoid doing anything that would hinder the creation of the next "Ridin Spinnas." But how? How do I manage to make YTMND profitable enough to pay for its own hosting while continuing to allow the freedom of expression at a level that anyone could make sites like Ridin Spinnas without advertisers being disgusted enough to want nothing to do with us? How could I continue to allow people to make sites covering any topic with any degree of vulgar or offensive material and manage to run a "business"?

After reading the terms of service and various agreements for each of the ad networks it was clear I had to make some fairly large structural changes. This was the birth of ytmnsfw.com. I thought, "I know! We just move anything offensive to a different domain! No one will have a problem discerning between something offensive and something which would be fine for a general audience, so I'll just let the users deal with it!" I even made a whole new version of the site with a different color scheme to highlight the offensive content! What a great idea!

It was around this time I realized the community I had envisioned where free speech was embraced and valued had not turned out as I planned. I was beginning to notice an alarming trend of young users posting extremely racist and purposefully offensive material. People going out of their way to post animated gifs of kittens having their heads crushed with high heels, piles of bodies in concentration camps, pictures of aborted fetuses and people eating feces. Humor not only in poor taste but obvious and simple, requiring no intelligence or tact.

It was disappointing to say the least. To a certain extent this site and the content it contains, how the community portrays itself represents me (and the actual business who at the time was paying to host me for free). I had the choice of sticking to free speech and having to look at horrifying, and in my opinion inartistic garbage, or I start to truly moderate and filter out really distasteful content.

Needless to say moderating is mind-numbingly horrible. We created a really simple moderation system, picked up moderators by making a forum post that said "anyone who posts in this thread gets to be a moderator" and that was that. We started with a queue of 150,000 unmoderated sites and by the time we got to 50,000 under our belts anyone who still had their sanity left was so disillusioned with YTMND and the queue had risen to over 250,000. The task quickly began to seem futile. If you think that the majority of YTMNDs are bad, try looking at every YTMND made sequentially, hundreds even thousands per day. You'll realize Inkdrinker may have been on to something.

Content is a joke

A quick look at the top viewed of all time will show you that a lot of YTMNDs most viewed content by outsiders originates not from YTMND but from other sites. It's easy to see the irony of users attacking sites that steal content when four out of the top five most viewed YTMNDs were created with the sole focus on content that wasn't even made by the user who made the YTMND.

If I've come to any sort of realization, it's clear that a huge percentage of the YTMND population is virtually useless for coming up with original content that's worth looking at. A sad realization, but I think many will agree that it's accurate. This is always going to be an issue on any site where the focus is user-created content. It just comes down to simple numbers; most people aren't going to be very good at being funny or creative.

YTMND's ease-of-use has partially encouraged many users to focus on quantity over quality. In the fast moving pace of the front page, people just throw every idea out there in hopes one of them will stick. There is no garbage collection, so over time the entire site just gets filled up with pure crap.

I've struggled with coming up to methods of lowering the amount of pure garbage that shows up on the site. I don't feel like it's possible to create a mathematical way to discern between a page having no value and a page being marvelous content-wise. I tried to come up with methods to have users do this, but users in general are selfish and unstrustworthy.

The boys club (no girls allowed!)

The only method I think truly has a chance to work is filtering who gets to be a part of the community before they can even join. This isn't another Web 2.0 cliché of beta version invite-only junk, it's a way to keep out people the community agrees will be more hurtful to the site than helpful.

Making YTMND invite-only would be a big move. I've always felt that part of the site's charm is that you can sign up and make something in less than 5 minutes and have it be available to all. In a perfect world this wouldn't pose a problem. However, the internet is far from a perfect world. Someone recently sent me an article by Clay Shirky (who some of you may remember wrote about YTMND in an article on "Mega-Niches") titled "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy". It's a long read but it's pretty amazing how many similarities between the YTMND community and the examples he uses in his article. It's well worth the read if you have any interest in the social aspect of large communities over time.

In one area it explains that in any community there will be a group of members that care about the future of the community and will take action to ensure the community continues to exist. It also goes on to explain that these users need to be given the power to "garden" the rest of the community; otherwise they will more or less give up on improving the community. These users need to be given more control over the direction of the site than the average user or those who wish to be hurtful towards the community.

Figuring out who these "gardeners" are is pretty much up to me (and as I find them, they help me find more). From searching for new moderators there have been many people I have felt could rise to the occasion but fall short due to sheer selfishness. People who have refused to abide by the simple rules of YTMND simply to get more time in the spotlight.

I'm straying off topic, but the point is, the users are what make YTMND. Crappy users make the site crappy, and rather than trying to delete crappy content, it would be far easier to just keep users who create crappy content off YTMND. The hard part is figuring out who to let in and who will add value to the community and the site as a whole.

I've spent the last few weeks trying to decide how an invitation system would work. Ideally I'd like to keep the ability to allow newcomers with no ties to the site to join, as well as allowing current users to invite a select few of their friends. Don't get me wrong, I don't want a pseudo invite system like Gmail where anyone who really wants in can get in and over time everyone will become a member anyway. This isn't to draw more people in; it's to filter out the bad apples (and there are a lot of them).

It goes without saying, an invitation system would almost completely remove the problem of alt accounts, gimmick users, etc. For this reason alone it may be worth doing. Expect this to be a major topic of discussion in the near future.

Monetizing a joke

Time moves on. Traffic increases. Long before advertisers come knocking at your door, salesmen do. I've had so many people try to sell me hosting I can't count the number of companies on fingers and toes. Out of all the sales pitches I've received, it's surprising that I haven't found a better deal than what I've had since the start. As of yet, not a single hosting company has been able to match the price Reflected was giving me. This has pretty much cleared up any doubt I had about Reflected offering me hosting at "cost", so if you wonder why I'm always telling you how great my hosting company is, it's because they really are.

Pretty soon I had enough money to stop leasing a server from my hosting company and buy my own server for YTMND, boy was that exciting. I was actually making enough money from AdSense to buy my own server. So I bought the beefiest server I could find that fit in my price budget. Two months later we hit capacity; I had to buy another server. I split the site up into a web server and a database server. This held up for another few months but it was obvious I had to start planning for some serious expansion for the future. We had hit the point where YTMND could no longer use 100mbit and we had to move to gigabit. I came up with specifications for a content server that would scale to massive proportions.

Spending $12,000 for a server was hard to justify, I've never spent that much money on anything in my entire life and I've owned cars, but I ignored the fact and purchased it anyway. This was the point when my bank's fraud department started calling me asking me about my purchases. Finally I had transferred the 800 precious megabytes that made up all of YTMND over to the new server and it was at that point I realized how much HTML I was transferring. Over a megabyte a second. Of HTML. Of text. One megabyte of text is a lot. Find a one megabyte text file and you will quickly realize that sending out 1.5MB/s of text is some serious shit.

Since then I've purchased a lot of servers. I own enough hardware to host thousands of dinky websites. The original few hundred megabytes I transferred over to the content server is now 600 gigabytes. YTMND is basically the biggest sound clip repository on the internet outside of usenet. It quickly became obvious I needed to put up more ads if I wanted to continue running the site in the black.

I read all sorts of documentation and studies describing the best placing and methods for advertising. I would be at work and having to go outside to take calls about advertising. My employer was understandably starting to get angry at me. It got to the point where I had to start taking unpaid time off work to deal with the backlog of things I needed to get done for YTMND. In a short amount of time the business aspects of YTMND were consuming so much of my time, it was almost a full-time job.

Working for the man (now dog)

It was at this time (almost a year ago at the time of my writing this) that I left my salary job to start working on YTMND "full-time". Little did I know how this would ruin my relationships with everyone I knew as I began working on YTMND more and more each day. 8 hour days turned into 12 hour days turned into 16 hour days turned into 20 hour days etc. Working on YTMND was consuming my entire life. I still work that way. I spend a lot of time on features that never see the day of light, but will hopefully soon. (Hey what's that lists tab on the user profile?!??)

So YTMND starts paying for my rent and my groceries, thereby removing any margin of profit from the equation. I would have to make some sacrifices (I've only bought one bottle of Grey Goose in the last 4 months!), but I was able to manage it. I was taking a big risk, because advertising earnings are pretty random from month to month for no apparent reason.

One of the reasons I've managed to maintain my motivation to keep working on the site is that as it grows, the technical challenge grows exponentially. Rolling out new features on such a limited amount of hardware that virtually millions of people will use gets harder and harder as the number of sites and users and votes increases. It gets to the point where you can't rely on the standard set of tools to get things done anymore. Luckily this is well documented by Slashdot and Livejournal, both of whom saw a huge amount of growth with the internet boom. At some point I'd like to write a document that describes the growth of YTMND from a more technical standpoint but I'll spare you for now. At any rate, the experience and knowledge I get from working on YTMND is better than that of any job I've ever had, which makes up for the horrible salary.

It's pretty hard to visualize YTMND as a business, especially seeing that it's the first "business" I've run. Pulling a large profit was never really a concern until recently and even now, it's less a priority than most of you would think. I've grown pretty accustomed to the standard of living of someone who works at McDonald's would. There came a time when I needed to make a serious decision about my plans for the future. Either I had to get serious about making YTMND into a business or I give up and close down the site. There wasn't really a middle ground here.

I figured implementing site sponsorship would take some of the load off the hosting costs of the site. In the 18 months since the sponsorship system launched, YTMND has received almost $30,000 in donations. That's a pretty amazing figure considering the average age of the user base. Sadly this is only enough after fees to pay for a few months of hosting at most.

Paid Membership

People say "Why not get rid of the ads and do paid memebership?! It worked for SomethingAwful!" However, the logic behind this question is flawed. The main problem with comparing Something Awful to YTMND in terms of monetization is that they are two completely different models commercially. SA's cost comes from the hardware and bandwidth costs of a forum that is used almost solely by its members. When a passerby comes to SA, it isn't a huge cost in terms of the necessary hardware and bandwidth used to fulfill the request. The only time the two sites have a similar cost is probably when SA gets linked to on Digg or the like, where they have tons of unregistered users looking at their pages.

YTMND's main cost is from bandwidth. YTMND was made with the idea that people would link to YTMNDs from off site, look at the page and then leave. Obviously this is a horrible "business model." YTMND doesn't need to profit off its members, but it needs to profit off the people who view it in passing, as that is where all its cost comes from. Assuming registered users don't use AdBlock (that's an entirely separate issue), browsing the pages on www and viewing the ads pretty much pays for itself. The cost comes from the people who never visit www, and only visit a YTMND en masse. Imposing paid membership would be taxing the wrong group of users.

Let's say out of the nearly 200,000 registered users, 5,000 are willing to pay a one time fee of $15 or so. That's pretty generous, considering that only 1,000 users have donated for site sponsorship. That's a quick and easy $75,000, and assuming out of the current growth of 200 users a day 5 sign up as paid members (which is pretty unlikely), that's an extra $2,300 a month. While this would be great for covering the hosting costs for the first 9 months or so (assuming I continued running a few ads to pay for my rent), after a year we'd be SOL. It isn't a sustainable amount of income to come close to paying for costs, and it puts the burden on the users who are actually already making the site money.

Paid membership also means people feel entitled to a level of service which I can't ensure at this point in time. Being the only real employee means that I have to do everything on the site: coding, system administration, support, legal issues, dealing with advertising, etc. Having a few thousand people that don't feel like they are getting their money's worth is one more thing I don't want to deal with. Plus it's nice to be able to tell people to F off when they feel resentment over a service I'm providing free of charge.

Goals for the future

The amount of money I owe my hosting company shows that the way YTMND is running now is less than ideal. Ideally I would like to be able to pay them off in full, and maybe even make a salary similar to what I would make if I were employed by a real company. I can say that I'd like to one day see YTMND having an office and a few full-time employees, but it's obviously far off at this point.
It's not humanly possible for me as one person can put into YTMND to get all of the things I want to accomplish done in a timely manner. It just isn't plausible especially when you look at the very partial to-do list I update from time to time. The only way to allow for continued growth and enhancement of YTMND is to bring on more people. The only way to bring on more people is to bring in more money. You get the idea.

Outside of that, YTMND needs to maintain a level of income where we can continue to provide a free service to the entire internet as well as have some liquid cash to do things like pay for the big upfront cost of printing t-shirts, buy new hardware and pay consultants to help out with things. YTMND is not currently achieving this, and therefore, I am forced to spend an unavoidable amount of time dealing with advertising. I in no way want to be involved with so much advertising work, but it's a necessary evil at this point.

Due to my complete lack of advertising know-how has resulted into the slow growth of ads all over the site. Until recently our advertising strategy was completely quantity as opposed to quality. By putting more ads on a page, YTMND nets more income, it's as simple as that. Now that more of our ad space is being represented by Federated Media, the tide is turning and it means I can start focusing less on finding new places to put ads and start focusing on places where I can remove them.

In the long run, the future of the site depends on you, the users. I personally don't run Adblock; this entire ordeal has taught me that free sites depend on advertising revenue to operate. It's easy to think that by running ad block you aren't really hurting anyone, just keeping the rich from getting richer. I wish that were true, but in a lot of cases it isn't. YTMND isn't a million dollar corporation. I'm not getting rich. When 10% or more of a site's regular users are running software to ensure that the site has no way of turning a profit off their usage, those users are potentially hurting the site significantly.

I would rather close the site than try to force the rest of the legitimate users who are viewing ads to support the site with even more ads. If you continue to expect to get a free service, while having us take a monetary hit and pay for your usage out of pocket, you are going to kill the site. You have as much power to kill YTMND as you do to make it bloom into something really great.

I'm not going to go into a big spiel about pirating music and movies and try to compare that to stealing or tell you that viewing YTMND without ads is akin to stealing. I just want to make it clear that using adblock is not inconsequential, and if you care at all about YTMND's future I'd advise against it. That being said I don't expect many (or really any) of you to change your ways. It isn't something a one time donation is going to solve, and it's yet another issue I have to deal with instead of working on new features.

I want to make it clear to you that I could easily be profiting off YTMND at this point and I choose not to, because I value the site. YTMND profits don't go to YTMND "shareholders", or the YTMND CEO's monthly bonus, they go back into YTMND. If I ran pop-unders (even after the majority of them have been blocked by blockers) YTMND would gross an extra $100,000 a year. Chew on that for a little bit the next time you want to compare me to a certain someone who is getting rich off other people's content. I understand motivation to ad block. Every time one of my pages loads slowly due to waiting for ad servers I die a little. I'm working on getting ads into separate iframes so they don't stop a page from loading. But in the meantime, it bugs me just as much as it bugs you.

Obviously five-figure ad deals don't come along often for us, but I'm hoping that will change. The reality is that we aren't a YouTube, MySpace or Facebook. I don't have investment capital to go buy a new server or hire someone to share the workload. In fact, if I were with another hosting company that required I pay the bill in full every month, YTMND would have closed down years ago.

To boil it down, in order for YTMND to survive the sub-domains are going to have to take a hit and have some real advertising on them. This will most likely end up in the form of ads being built into the preloader, meaning people won't be able to adblock them. Meaning that a YTMND will have a minimum loading time of 8 to 10 seconds. I have yet to hash out the actual implementation of this, but I'm hoping to make it as unobtrusive as possible.

Do I think I deserve to personally make money from YTMND? Yeah, it's consumed the last three years of my life. I could be making more money working a full-time job than I currently am from YTMND. Whoever said hard work pays off was full of shit. So, you can see why the last year has been a bit depressing. You can also see how disappointing it is when users declare it's time for a civil war because the site is bowing to the basic rules of capitalism.

Look back over the history of YTMND. I have never screwed the users over. I have tried to keep shady ads off the site, when I see ads with sound or flashing junk I try to remove them as soon as possible. I don't sell your user info. I don't require much of anything from you. I'm going to do what needs to be done in order to keep the site viable and fun to work on. If I can't get enough cooperation, there will no longer be any reason to keep YTMND going. People who want to continue to act out in a childish manner every time YTMND lands an advertising deal are welcome to leave and start/host their own website to see how well it works out. If you are so sure the earth is flat, prove it.





Also, cocks.