Saturday, January 25, 2014

A Trailer Park with a View

If blogspot is considered a low rent district on the Internet; I think one should call Tumblr the Trailer Park of the Internet.

Like blogspot, the rent is cheap (free). The neighbors on tumblr are noisy and hooting it up all day with many engaged in "Not Safe for Work" activities. But if you can ignore the noise, Tumblr has a pretty view.

The site is set up for photo sharing.

Tumblr was designed for the world's creators. Designers (and the public at large) post their photos and media creations. Tumblr addicts "like" or "reblog" the photos they like. The best photos get hundreds of thousands of hits. Most get only a few page views:

I just happen to live in one of the prettiest places on earth: The Mountain West. So, I decide to make tumblr blogs for the states of the Mountain West. The blogs cover the following areas:
Each of these blogs contain a large number of photos from the state (about 500 photos a piece). My hope is that some traffic from Tumblr might find my collection of local directories.

The challenge of tumblr is that most people using the platform only look at sites from their dashboard. Since there are millions of blogs on the site, your actual blog will only get a few posts.

A year into this effort, I am seeing about 1 person per day visiting the blogs.

I thought about putting hit counters on each of the site, then having a race to see which gets the most hits. Since the blogs get very few views, I realized I'd be showing failure stats, not success states; So, I did something even more nefarious. I put ads on the site. Ads have internal hit counters.

Most people hate ads. But the most common conversation in the trailer park is: "How do we get out of this trailer park?" Ads are pretty much the only legal way to make money off the Internet.