Viralnova.com potentially up for grabs



So talk about a sale, score a bananaboatload of links and start scoring in some SERP love and baddabingbaddaboom more monies.

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more monies from what? ranking for 'bird jumping game'? your comment shows a lack of understanding or realisation at the changing nature of the game. people are banking just from creating shit that gets shared socially and reaches the whole fucking world through that alone. flappy bird shows us that all you need is something that people find enough value in to talk about and share with each other. if you succeed in doing this you will get 1000x more hits than every seo campaign you've ever ran in your life put together. and yet here you are trying to fit this into your search ranking equation. smack that seo out of your brain, bro.
 
more monies from what? ranking for 'bird jumping game'? your comment shows a lack of understanding or realisation at the changing nature of the game. people are banking just from creating shit that gets shared socially and reaches the whole fucking world through that alone. flappy bird shows us that all you need is something that people find enough value in to talk about and share with each other. if you succeed in doing this you will get 1000x more hits than every seo campaign you've ever ran in your life put together. and yet here you are trying to fit this into your search ranking equation. smack that seo out of your brain, bro.

A section of the site on cool gadgets/products or whatever that could also go "viral" is a way to leverage the search benefit. His current content isn't where he would get value from search. Just post a few cool products in a "cool product" section of the site each day, and drop their affiliate links. Go out there and do research, try to setup direct placement deals with product makers, etc. Make it someone's job to do this alone. He'd make a killing.

Search carries a lot more intent than someone clicking a title to read about bullshit, and he could generate a lot of additional revenue by doing the above. 1 social hit != 1 targeted search hit. The social drives all your links and the bulk of your traffic, whilst you generate additional revenue promoting easily monetised pages that appear in search.

Monetisation and traffic strategies don't all have to be mutually exclusive. To rely on social for all your traffic and income is just as stupid as relying on search.
 
A section of the site on cool gadgets/products or whatever that could also go "viral" is a way to leverage the search benefit. His current content isn't where he would get value from search. Just post a few cool products in a "cool product" section of the site each day, and drop their affiliate links. Go out there and do research, try to setup direct placement deals with product makers, etc. Make it someone's job to do this alone. He'd make a killing.

Search carries a lot more intent than someone clicking a title to read about bullshit, and he could generate a lot of additional revenue by doing the above. 1 social hit != 1 targeted search hit. The social drives all your links and the bulk of your traffic, whilst you generate additional revenue promoting easily monetised pages that appear in search.

Monetisation and traffic strategies don't all have to be mutually exclusive. To rely on social for all your traffic and income is just as stupid as relying on search.
I agree, in fact I considered your points in the middle para of what you said when writing my post. A targeted search visitor is of course worth much much more, and of course it would be better to have multiple traffic sources.

I just wanted an excuse to lash out at the overly search focused mindset that a lot of people seem to have.
 
more monies from what? ranking for 'bird jumping game'? your comment shows a lack of understanding or realisation at the changing nature of the game. people are banking just from creating shit that gets shared socially and reaches the whole fucking world through that alone. flappy bird shows us that all you need is something that people find enough value in to talk about and share with each other. if you succeed in doing this you will get 1000x more hits than every seo campaign you've ever ran in your life put together. and yet here you are trying to fit this into your search ranking equation. smack that seo out of your brain, bro.


Flappy Bird made bank from its ads. Not because it was shared and it grew virally. Obviously that helped bring more eyeballs on the ads.

I don't agree with your statement that all we need is something that people find value in and talk about and share with each other. I don't think you meant that literally but I'll address it anyhow.

I take issue with this because it reminds me of Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.

Great for those guys that can start up a great idea and then sell it without any monetization whatsoever. Good for them!

But let's be real... that's money that companies like Yahoo! threw away that they have not even seen a return on. Have they even attempted to monetize Tumblr yet?

People's retort may be, "but Tumblr has millions of users... if they put ads on there then they'll make lots of money. It has potential!" Potential doesn't make anyone money. Facts and numbers do. When you talk potential, you start dealing with emotion instead of logic. And emotion is what they use against you to sell you the weight loss product, car, house, etc.

People fall into the hype that the media and the audience create around new start ups that have no monetization.

Virality (is that a word) doesn't make money directly. And this recent trend of one hit wonders that is dilituting the business world and its common sense.

How the fuck do you value Snapchat at around 3-4 billion. On what? It's insane. It's so scammy.

But Yahoo and Facebook can afford to piss away money... before they go under that is.

What's the takeaway message here? To stop trying to scam people and stop trying to make money off one hit wonders. Look at this whole "make money online" thing as a long term investment rather than a get rich quick scheme. Acquire the skills of a real entrepreneur and that includes monetizing ideas, products, etc. on top of developing them. Because if you learn how to do so for one product or idea... then i'm willing to bet you could do so for another and so forth. That skill will be invaluable and will make you more money in the long run.

Kind of like how Eduardo sold bright.com for millions. And that wasn't his first. And because he has developed the talent and skills of an entreprenuer... it surely won't be his last.

"Give a man a fish and you will have fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will feed himself for the rest of his life."






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respectfully disagree

Two scenarios:
A) put all your eggs in the seo basket and we all know our exposure to the SE's..can ruin us in one algo tweak.

B) social. Build a brand that is shared with repeated visits/ even if the social site tweaks their search you have already established your brand and people go direct

You decide which offers a better long term advantage.



"Monetisation and traffic strategies don't all have to be mutually exclusive. To rely on social for all your traffic and income is just as stupid as relying on search."
 
Two scenarios:
A) put all your eggs in the seo basket and we all know our exposure to the SE's..can ruin us in one algo tweak.

B) social. Build a brand that is shared with repeated visits/ even if the social site tweaks their search you have already established your brand and people go direct

You decide which offers a better long term advantage.

Why does A) not benefit from brand recognition in the same way B) does? They both generate traffic.

You're saying that social traffic is better for building brand recognition than search effectively, and is that categorically true?

Relying on one traffic source is poor no matter what traffic source it is, at least in terms of building a long term business. You can't categorically say relying on search is better than relying on social, or vice versa, because it depends on millions of factors.

The same algo tweak that can ruin search can ruin social. Do you think all the viral nova visitors would keep coming back if it was killed in the Facebook algo's? It'll drop off fast. No one cares about the brand, they just click it when they see intriguing titles shared on Facebook. There's nothing to differentiate Viralnova from 5000 other viral content sites.

I've found myself clicking some of them on Facebook, but do I ever think "hey, lets go check out Viralnova/buzzfeed/upworthy" ? No.
 
Two scenarios:
A) put all your eggs in the seo basket and we all know our exposure to the SE's..can ruin us in one algo tweak.

B) social. Build a brand that is shared with repeated visits/ even if the social site tweaks their search you have already established your brand and people go direct

You decide which offers a better long term advantage.

If you aren't capturing the audience, with email or direct contact information, to continue the conversation both scenarios are a little moot in terms of branding. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can delete your accounts/pages/groups with a click of a button. Your "Macro View" goal should be to bring that 3rd party activity to an in-house database that you ultimately control, otherwise you're still relying on 3rd parties for your marketing and revenue. Same goes with email/newsletter services, if you aren't backing them up to an in-house database, you can be wiped out with some unknown TOS violation that you committed.​
 
absolutely- and a question for CC

If you aren't capturing the audience, with email or direct contact information, to continue the conversation both scenarios are a little moot in terms of branding. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can delete your accounts/pages/groups with a click of a button. Your "Macro View" goal should be to bring that 3rd party activity to an in-house database that you ultimately control, otherwise you're still relying on 3rd parties for your marketing and revenue. Same goes with email/newsletter services, if you aren't backing them up to an in-house database, you can be wiped out with some unknown TOS violation that you committed.​

Agreed. Something VN has missed out on and will hurt his valuation.
The big question is- over the maturation period, how many people go direct versus still hit up their FB page.

IF he hasn't managed to get the majority of his traffic direct versus going thru the FB page, his exposure is huge.

On that note- any ideas on how to get people to go direct versus using FB as the launch point?
 
Two scenarios:
A) put all your eggs in the seo basket and we all know our exposure to the SE's..can ruin us in one algo tweak.

B) social. Build a brand that is shared with repeated visits/ even if the social site tweaks their search you have already established your brand and people go direct

You decide which offers a better long term advantage.

Why does A) not benefit from brand recognition in the same way B) does? They both generate traffic.

You're saying that social traffic is better for building brand recognition than search effectively, and is that categorically true?

Relying on one traffic source is poor no matter what traffic source it is, at least in terms of building a long term business. You can't categorically say relying on search is better than relying on social, or vice versa, because it depends on millions of factors.

The same algo tweak that can ruin search can ruin social. Do you think all the viral nova visitors would keep coming back if it was killed in the Facebook algo's? It'll drop off fast. No one cares about the brand, they just click it when they see intriguing titles shared on Facebook. There's nothing to differentiate Viralnova from 5000 other viral content sites.

I've found myself clicking some of them on Facebook, but do I ever think "hey, lets go check out Viralnova/buzzfeed/upworthy" ? No.

I already alluded to this earlier. Viral Nova has little to no brand equity whatsoever.

I messaged mpbiz the same thing about not losing the audiences trust from shoving ads in their face right from the forefront, however, I don't think that matters much when you have no real brand value to your audience. The only brand value that Viral Nova has is from the notoriety it has garnered from reporters for "bad" journalism and doing something that has never been done before. It has garnered a lot of interest from internet marketers too, but from the general public, not so much. He could swap out the domain name, clone the website, and post it up on his fan page and very little would change.
 
That's exactly the worry. Sell while the selling is good. Doing what he is doing with ViralNova is no more reliable than depending on a network of made for adsense sites. They both lend themselves to being destroyed overnight by either algorithms or getting hacked from adsense.

I don't understand the comparison here. All he has to worry about is Facebook suddenly shutting down the page on a whim.

What's all this talk about algorithms and getting hacked?
 
sharing is nice, money is better, I have some artists sometimes fit out with merchandise
i help them promote it, they get youtube views and are happy as hell when they get 100k views
i sell my merchandise i'm happy as hell too even though i don't have my own videos
 
I don't understand the comparison here. All he has to worry about is Facebook suddenly shutting down the page on a whim.

What's all this talk about algorithms and getting hacked?
i rely heavily on facebook and it worries me, it's why i offer incentives and stuff for phone numbers and emails

i don't think they will knock me out of the game, but i used to reach 1 million people a week two years ago with 10k fans and now I reach 1 million (maybe a little more) with combined 140k or so fans.
it's already adjusted and didn't hurt my sales because of growth
but it capped the potential where I could be if they'd still show shit to everyone.
though that was never gonna last the feed gets to crowded.
they will adjust again and it's smart to have a few side options just in case.
so i'm working 10x as much on instagram, tumblr and even building my own app and niche social to not be as reliant.

facebook wants to make money, they know we make money from it but they don't.
if one day they'd force me to pay for every single viewer I would have no option but to pay if it's still profitable.

i don't think they will, but I don't like being in this cage.

at the same time, the worry is probably overblown, because facebook wins just as much with content people come to facebook for.
So realistically I don't think they will monetize all views or majority even.
but like most i'm paranoid.
 
I don't understand the comparison here. All he has to worry about is Facebook suddenly shutting down the page on a whim.

What's all this talk about algorithms and getting hacked?

Facebook's news feed algorithms. Getting the hammer from Adsense.
 
Flappy Bird made bank from its ads. Not because it was shared and it grew virally. Obviously that helped bring more eyeballs on the ads.
what the fuck? how do you think it made money from ads? from people landing on the page by accident? from google search pages? it was viral/social growth. people installed it, talked about it with their friends, and the cycle repeated itself. the rise in the app store was as a direct consequence of this, and of course once your in the top 10 in the app store it fucking explodes even more.
 
i don't think they will knock me out of the game, but i used to reach 1 million people a week two years ago with 10k fans and now I reach 1 million (maybe a little more) with combined 140k or so fans.
wait, how do you reach 10x more than your actual fan number? ive got pages with 100k fans and they reach about 10%, not 10x