Advertising, Revenues and harsh realities
coComment started, as a company, in January 2007. coComment, the concept, is significantly older having first seen the light of day as a proof of concept demo at the Lift 06 conference.
In that time, we have transformed what was a concept into a company with a very different (and much larger) product set, built a team of 22 people and acquired over 1.15million users.
However, in all that time, we’ve not made a cent/penny/grivna in revenues nor have we sought to do so. The funding from coComment has come solely from its investors.
For us, 2008 is a critical year. It is the time when we need to go from ‘promising startup’ to ‘viable business’ and a key part of that is starting to generate revenues. We want to do so in a manner that does not alienate our users nor distract them from what they want to do with coComment.
We have therefore started running advertising on the site, in our feeds to others sites and in coComment windows. I know, of course, that most people would prefer to see advertising-free services but the reality is, of course, that ultimately we cannot provide the service to you without generating revenues.
I also want us to offer our users the opportunity to have an ad-free service for an annual fee of $5.
I’ve seen some comments on other blogs … but not many. I therefore wanted to raise the issue here so that everyone has an opportunity to respond and let us know what they think. We’re all in favour of conversations so we’re happy to start one about this and get your views.
Best regards,
Matt.
RSS feed
April 8th, 2008 at 12:00
How about u guys fix the service first? Its not updating none of the blogs that im commenting on so this service is no use for me. Also, it shows wrong blog names on my page… I’ve sent an e-mail to the support several days ago but no reply. Are you guys on vacation?
April 8th, 2008 at 13:07
Hi Mickey. No, we’re not on vacation … except one of our developers who is getting married this weekend.
I will chase up your emails to support and you can also contact me directly on matt@cocomment.com.
Best regards,
Matt.
April 8th, 2008 at 16:43
Thq Matt for the personal care taking, I will email you later today about my problems.
And congrat to the fellow developer that is getting married!
I took a look at the advertising that you mention in the blog post, its harmless.
As I see it, if CoCo is good enough, ads wont make me leave you. Except if you guys patch 90% of the content on the site with ads
About the annual fee, why not make it one time payment, my expirience is that ppl rather pay once than having a membership that needs to be renewed every now and then. its less fuss for us and for you.
Make the one time fee $10-15 or something like that, it should cover you for 2-3 years and if the product is good, new members will register every month so the income will be steady.
April 9th, 2008 at 08:27
I really like that idea … but what do you think to having it as an option … $5 per annum or $15 lifetime usage ?
I think we would probably have to cap it at only so many at that rate or otherwise we would, eventually, stop receiving anything but, other than that, really like the idea.
Cheers,
Matt.
PS. I promise NOT to cover 90% of the site with ads
April 13th, 2008 at 11:47
…. download emule…
…. you have won a green card !!11….
…. you have won 1b dollars !!! just click here !!!…
Very stylish ads…. indeed.
As good as the service.
April 13th, 2008 at 19:46
Matt, options are allways good
Dunno if any cap will be needed, there are online games that use this kind of feature and its been like that since 7-8 years back, with out any cap. You can of course always disable the option when you see that this isnt going as intended.
The usage of Internet is growing each day so I doubt that you guys will run out of new users, but I guess you got your own statistics to use to see where you guys are going (or not).
PS: Havent e-mailed you about my problem that cuz it seem to be working now.
April 14th, 2008 at 19:53
[…] (a service which allows you aggregate your blog comments from all over the web) have finally started to monetize their service. I didn’t realize it until I was commenting on some blogs today and spotted the advertising […]
April 16th, 2008 at 10:21
With all honesty, the banners displayed on the cocomment site are awful and are making the service look VERY unprofessional - totally agree with “disappointed” on this one. Few will argue that perception is 99% of reality, so with those banner ads making the site look like crap, the whole service becomes questionable. I felt like I was about to get a trojan into my computer when I first saw www.cocomment.com
there are other advertising partners that don’t crap up your web site with ads that flash in your face. most opensource projects are using google ad sens now (just an example) that displays relevant ads that look very subtle.
as for a paid service - i personally would never pay for it, the value I get from “a single place to manage all my comments” is simply not worth the hassle of having to manage a subscription or disclosing my credit card information (or having to register with paypal or something). Please don’t make it a paid service!
April 18th, 2008 at 16:41
[…] di così “eclatante” o, inaspettato: tant’è vero che c’è stato persino un annuncio ufficiale. Sta di fatto che, da qualche giorno, coComment ha cominciato a mostrare la pubblicità nei form […]
April 18th, 2008 at 19:44
Long time CoCo user here. I don’t think US$5/yr is too much; I understand that developers gotta eat. However, I’ve been getting so many errors lately when submitting comments - the service simply not working as it should - that I’m considering dropping its use. I could probably take up the issue with the support group, but I just can’t be bothered right now.
Another issue: my “conversations” list simply doesn’t work like I expect. I expect the most recent stuff first - it’s always comments from months ago that show up.
If it doesn’t work, I gotta move on.
I think CoCo is on the right track, conceptually. The blogosphere needs a way for people to connect with their comments - it’s worth writing decent comments if I can leverage their collective value on my blog. It builds my personal brand.
I wish there was a better way for you than advertising. Perhaps in time a paid service might do it alone. However, now that users have had a taste of the free, it’s nearly impossible to move that way without a significant added value.
April 18th, 2008 at 19:46
Also: I agree with some of the commenters here about the ad selection. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were unobtrusive AdWords or… something a little classier. It cheapens your brand. Think upscale! Or, at least, more upscale.
Hang in there, CoCo. If things improve, I’ll be back.
April 18th, 2008 at 20:02
One more thing… I’m probably willing to tolerate ads in my CoCo comment fields, but don’t want my users to see them. If they don’t show up in my “user comments” script on my site, I’ll probably leave that there.
I tweaked my widget to just show my recent posts, rather than others’ responses. That’s better.
I won’t click on an ad in my comment bar, ever. I block web ads wherever I can, and I’m not alone in that. I’m ok with paying a small fee, and I hope other users will, too.
Look how well 37signals has done with Basecamp et. al.; money can be made on web apps. Don’t cheapen a great concept with poor-quality ads. It just seems desperate.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:00
@Allan What sort of error do you get when submitting a comment ? Does it happen on a specific blog ? We will investigate ASAP what is going on.
Regarding your conversation page (http://www.cocomment.com/myConversations): the default sorting is to show the conversations by last comment date. Could you please send me a screen shot of your page ?
We do not put ads in the widgets and in your own comments RSS feed. So when you use our service to show your comments, no ads will be displayed.
Thanks for your comments.
April 19th, 2008 at 23:59
[…] I understand that coComment needs to “monetize”, though one could question a business model which seems to be based on revenue from scrolling ads […]
April 22nd, 2008 at 06:12
Re: errors on submit: it seems to have abated. For about two weeks, both my wife and I could not submit comments without the alert box.
Thank you for not displaying ads in the widgets. That would have been the last straw.
I’m willing to see them there, but please do consider our points on the KIND of ads you have.
April 22nd, 2008 at 20:04
If the message changes every few minutes, that’s one thing, but the continuous movement takes active energy to ignore. It pulls at me. I now cannot type comments in, on any coComment-enabled blog, without feeling annoyed.
I understand you want to make money. Heck, _I_ want you to make money so you’ll stay around. I’m interested in hearing about the $15 for lifetime membership you mentioned on Climb to the Stars. It’s only the scrolling effect (and any other moving effect) that I simply can’t stand.
Maybe you can double the height of the toolbar and have non-moving text that changes every few minutes?
Maybe you can find other revenue streams, like a coComment analytics service that gives statistics to blog owners, including a cloud map of their blogs in relation to others.
But please remove the scrolling from the toolbar.