How successful are joke and humor sites. I've been thinking about starting a large one up. Something like collegehumor.com, funnyjunk and those types. Is the market too saturated, or do new joke sites have a good chance? What types of costs would I be looking at to get one off the ground? And is it better to use existing software, or have on professionally coded?
Im not sure how successful they are but I do know that there are alot out there already. If you can make it something different to the rest than your off to a good start!
I'm assuming by joke/humor sites you mean 'mass media entertainment' sort of sites. The market is extremely saturated with such content, due to the surplus in easy-to-use scripts and databases for webmasters to utilize in cloning CollegeHumor/eBaumsworld/Newgrounds/Funnyjunk/Break sorts of sites. The key is to grab onto original content. Should you have the financial resources to reward visitors for submitting content (Break.com offers quite a large $XXX-$X,XXX per video, if good), that may be an easy task. However, if you wish to simply and quickly setup a site that has a database of videos from yesteryear, and attempt to get rely off SEO and word of mouth to get your site going, it ain't going to happen. The top sites for such content have already spent years developing their brand, and have successfully established themselves as the source for online entertainment.
That's a tough question and should be evaluated by your own status. Personally, I have the tools, the advertisers, and the friends to get a site of that nature going, should I have the time, the finances allocated, and the willpower to create such a site. Suppose you pay for some nice videos. You place your watermark in the bottom right of the video, and then you utilize WoM to virally spread the video. Before you know it, even the big sites that you speak of may pick up on your content. Throw out a few good humorous pieces of content, and soon enough visitors will start to visit your site on a daily basis. Continue to do the following, and in a year you'll have a large following and a ton of traffic. However, things may not work picture-perfect. S'pose you can't find anyone to submit good videos to you, your budget runs out, your site gets hacked, or your design is just too mainstream/common. Then you will not be making money. It's your choice. I enjoy working on my content sites. But should you become a big site, the entertainment industry tends to have high ROI.
OK, Thanks so much, all this has been taken into consideration. I'm working on a project right now, but after I sell that in an estimated (+-) six months, I might consider doing something like this. Thanks again!
Give it a shot. For starter, simply write unique content on the description (you can get someone here to submit at just .25$ per videos with unique description). This unique description will help you build on your SEO i.e. visitors search for your site through search engine. In other word, there's no need for the original video clip as yet. I, in fact, have just started to have one video clips site (my last signature) which I have so fast invest less than 100$ on it and I could see there's around 100 users per day on the few few days. I have been working hard on writing unique description and so far I have submitted more than 50 clips. So i think you should go about doing that. Remember>> buy more inbound links ( if you have one such site, do pm me for link exchange, or pm me if you need help on the script).
just the description is unique (need lots of $$$ to invest in original content). But like i said, for the start, a unique description will do as it is to make your site known to Search engine and people can find your sites from Search engine. After 6 months or 1 year, you may think of how to get unique contents.
I'm all for that. Now do you recommend me using a free/paid script, or hiring someone to code it for me?
chuck, it's up to you to decide.... those are business decisions... you know the ins and outs a free or paid script -> less expensive, less attractive or unique design hiring a coder -> more expensive, more likely to have a nice unique design and feel to your site this you already know what you know and we don't know is how much money you wanna put into this, how much time and all. so without those informations those kind of recommendations (free script vs hiring coder) are not really valuable, cause we don't know enough of your biz model.
They are verry unstable. You will have usualy the same crowed of people on your site over and over again making some ad networks think your cheating when ips are the same every few days. But they seem to get alot of returning visitors witch is good seeing how studies show you have a 3% chance of a first time visitor clicking an add but a 15% for returning visitors
you can modified the free script to suit you. Or if you have some cash to invest, it's best to have custom coded. That way your site is unique and may be more secure as there's only one company knows how the site operated.