Re: Mark Manson's Paid Membership Subscription Review & Demo: Compared to Chase'
Space-
Space said:
TTo start with, something to consider is, none of those two guys resort to buying ads, not on Facebook, not on each other's sites, such as
Chase did. So how they got so popular without buying ads? Easy. They live in the 21st century.
I wrote about network effects here (4th paragraph).
I understand where you're coming from. However, there are a lot of assumptions here I think are not correct.
One, we were significantly more popular (traffic-wise) than Mark's site until he began doing the MSM blitz. Then suddenly he was getting traffic from CNN and other places, as well as all those juicy MSM high authority backlinks. Then he eclipsed our traffic and has stayed higher. I explored this option in 2014 when I saw how well Mark was doing with it... I talked to publications like
The Atlantic, etc., about getting a column. But the kind of content I'd need to write to do it -- I'm sure I could double/triple GC in size and get us to 2MM or 3MM/month in visitors if I killed all the un-P.C. stuff and redid the entire site as a slightly-edgy-but-mostly-P.C. guide to getting dates and then did a couple columns on MSM sites. But then I'd be teaching watered down tech that would marginally help 250K men per month (or however many stick around out of the 3 million that would find us) instead of hard tech that GREATLY helps 75K men (or however many stick around out of the 1 million that find us) per month. I would much rather have a big impact on a somewhat smaller number of men than a shallow impact on a far larger number of men.
ROK beat us in traffic, primarily by generating boatloads of controversy and blowing up the Twittersphere with campaigns like "Fat Shaming Week" and Tut's "24 Signs She's a Slut" article. The "rape meetings" B.S. blew the site up bigger, but it also destroyed Roosh's business and demoralized him to the point where there was a noticeable decline in his "be the provocateur" strategy, and now ROK is closed down.
I have a number of organic traffic efforts we're working on and rolling out now. The site will be bigger. The forum will be bigger too. But we're going to do it without watering down the message to become MSM-approved so we can go on CNN like Mark Manson. And we're going to do it without calling women sluts or fatties or griping about feminists so much, so we can do it without instilling a bunch of negative, self-destructive thought patterns in men (not to mention bring the entire establishment out to crush us).
As for advertising, it has been a business goal for us for 10 years to get the point where we can advertise successfully at scale. It is not something we have "resorted" to -- it is something we have tested and planned for carefully for a decade.
You might be the sort of guy who says "XYZ unnamed cola brand/musician is better, because you can only find it through word-of-mouth and you'll never see it pay for advertising", but that doesn't stop Coca-Cola or U2 from doing way, way better in everything from reach, to audience size, to revenues, to (perhaps most important of all -- looking at you, Mystery Method, Charisma Arts, Love Systems, and most recently Return of Kings -- all those guys worked all the free/MSM media channels
plenty) longevity. How many XYZ unnamed cola brands and musicians will still be in the game 20 years from now? U2 may have aged out but I bet they will still have a large fan base and make plenty of sales... and Coca-Cola ain't going anywhere.
The fact that we are finally able to advertise effectively is a very good thing. It opens up a lot of possibilities, not just for monetization but ways to get more eyeballs on pages, and on other things we're building (like a GC Facebook Group, the YouTube channel, etc. -- these are things you grow fastest when you are advertising at the same time you're building buzz by word-of-mouth).
So yeah, don't worry -- we'll do more organic stuff. I have plenty of projects in the works on these. I couldn't focus on traffic for a long time (haven't really focused on it since 2014... and have not
seriously focused on it since 2012) because we needed to get One Date out, then once it was out there was (and still is) a lot of stuff to finish with building the sales and marketing funnel for that, and reconfiguring GC tech (like integrating all the software/logins, and getting this forum moved over to a new URL, updated, and tricked out).
We'll be doing a lot more marketing in the future, every way we can, without selling out to the MSM or shoveling controversy for the sake of making Twitter heads explode. Both those paths are faster/easier -- but they lead us somewhere different than where we ultimately want to go.
Chase
