As most of you know, Sexy Widget is not a full time gig for me. My day job is running a consumer rating site called RateItAll. The site gets pretty big traffic, and is growing steadily. Quantcast, using actual traffic data that we supply, ranks us in the top 3,000 US sites.
I believe that one of the secrets to the site’s growth has been our decision to embrace “long tail rating” by allowing our users to create and manage interactive rating lists on just about every topic imaginable. These lists are often obscure, sometimes entertaining, occasionally useful, and other times, utterly ridiculous. What we’ve found is that if you aggregate thousands of obscure lists, the aggregated demand for those lists translates into real traffic.
Anyway, we now have about 25K of these lists, of varying quality, usefulness, and entertainment value. Borrowing a page from Fred Wilson, we’ve decided to microchunk these rating lists (in the form of Flash widgets), and set them free around the Web.
So the decision that we were faced with was whether to take on this project in house (including design, configuration tool, distribution, analytics), or to outsource it to one of the widget platforms.
The key decision factor for us lay in the RSS feeds that were already being generated by our rating lists. Because MuseStorm was the first of the widget platforms to launch a public RSS to Flash Widget conversion tool, I was able to get to a comfort level with their platform before even speaking with them about the project. Conceptually, it was far less daunting to take the incremental step of using our RSS feeds to build out a MuseStorm widget, than it was to start the whole thing from scratch.
Then there was the issue of cash flow. We structured our agreement with MuseStorm on a CPM basis, with a small monthly minimum spend. Because RateItAll is a bootstrapped company, it’s a big deal not to have to shell out thousands up front in development costs for a project like this. As an added bonus, MuseStorm’s designer worked with us to come up with a distinct look & feel for our widgets, which saved us cash on the design as well.
Anyway, now it’s live. MuseStorm’s widget configuration tool is hooked up to every one of our rating lists. We have custom designs available to our site visitors, and have access to fairly robust analytics about where these widgets are ending up and how often they are being viewed.
In addition to being able to grab lists that are already on the site, anybody who wants to can now create an interactive rating list using RateItAll's free tool, and immediately generate a slick Flash widget.
We’re hopeful that the syndication potential of some of these lists combined with our revenue sharing program might actually make some of our users some good money.
If you’d like to see a few examples of MuseStorm / RateItAll lists, you can check out the RateItAll Blog.
If you’d like to browse some lists and grab one for yourself, check out our list tag cloud.
Here’s a link to the press release.
MuseStorm seems to have been momentarily overwhelmed by traffic. The write up on Mashable probably didn't help. Hopefully things will be working again shortly.
Posted by: lawrence | March 21, 2007 at 09:01 AM