Tuesday, October 28, 2008

The Future of TorrentFries' Blog

You may have noticed that we've been running a little short on subjects for discussion of late. This was intended to be an account of the day-to-day operation of a tracker, but with the site's untimely demise, that fell by the wayside and we ended up relying on a series of exposés instead. That's all well and good, and I really hope you've found them useful, interesting and/or insightful up to this point. However, there is only so much that one can discuss without the constant influx of new material resulting from running a live tracker.

Therefore, I'm interested to get your take on where we should go from here. We have been discussing creating a forum for those interested in the subjects we've discussed here, so that remains an option. We may also move to a less intense publication schedule, although that's only prolonging the inevitable. One way or another, the blog's days are numbered, so if you have any questions that we've left unaddressed, by all means, leave us a comment and we'll see what we can do for you.

7 comments:

Nick said...

aaah now i understand why my comment with the riddle in it was deleted from the 404 article. I thought you guys were just paying homage to that tracker.
Such a shame...First that, now this :(

Pavel said...

Well this is my first comment on here, but I've been really enjoying reading all the posts, great job guys!!

I'd like to ask about 2 things:
You mentioned donations as a way of getting the tracker finances - how do you think users should be noticed about them? One button saying "donate" or something? And how do you feel about motivating users to donate? Giving donators bonuses etc...

Second thing I'd like to ask is:
You wrote that you think that dead forum can scare away the users, that's true, but would do you recommend to keep the forum alive?

Thanks for this awesome blog and I'd like to thank you for running TorrentFries as well, even though I discovered it only month before you closed it and wasn't able to get myself to register :-D or check it out some more, I still think you did a great job there, so hats off!

nonymous said...

First comment here too. I've been following this blog since the start and I think it's great. it's been very informative and helpful.
A forum would be a great idea as it would allow people to directly ask questions, but I don't think it'd get a large community around it, so it might look kinda dead at times. Perhaps make it a one-forum affair, which has no list of forums, but instead immediately shows you the list of threads.
I think you should compile everything that's been written into a big document, so that it can be distributed as a file and doesn't simply vanish one day.

A subject I'd like to see talked about more is finding a place to host the new tracker, as I think this is probably the first hurdle in the way of anyone wanting to try their hand at this.

CurlyFries said...

@pavel: I'll be sure to cover both of those subjects in future posts.

@nonymous: The blog will always be here. As far as I know, Blogger/Google blogs don't expire, so just leaving it up should be fine for the foreseeable future.

I've discussed the subject of hosting before, including with reference to ways to host new trackers. Was there anything in particular that we've missed out on ?

Jack said...

Great blog, keep up the good work guys.
I have few questions for you.
In one of ur latest posts u said that with adds u earn $30/mo , you also said that you use "Project Wonderful".
Did u try other add providers like AdBrite?
Why did u go with "Project Wonderful"?
How many pageviews&unique visitors do u get per day?
Whats rank of TorrentFries(actual website not this blog) on Alexa?

CurlyFries said...

@jack: Your questions are pretty brief in nature so I'll just respond to them here.

Project Wonderful was the provider we ended up going with from the get-go and we really enjoyed working with them, so we saw no need to change. We could have been making considerably more money with other providers, but I didn't feel like I was selling my soul to these guys.

By the end we were looking at roughly 20,000 uniques a day. The Alexa rank averaged around 70,000, with spikes as high as 20,000.

Pavel said...

Thanks a lot, looking forward to it :-)

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