SoccerClub.com
I’ve had my SoccerClub.com site since 1997. It started as plain HTML, then I taught myself Active Server Pages and converted it to a more user generated site. Not to be confused with UGC circa 2009, but UGC 1997 with forums and emailing functionality.
Back in November, I transformed it to a social network using the Ning platform. Using only Ning’s out-of-the-box features, it was pretty easy to do, but still took about a month of configuring and tweaking. From there I sent out invitations to the email addresses that I had collected over the last 3 years. The result was a quick 300 members, and since then the membership has grown to 580. I am very excited about that my goal is to push it to 1000 by the end of February.
What I have learned is the same story that the mega-billionaires have learned – there’s no money in social networking if you use the old ad model. Comparing the last two Decembers show so much. The 2007 was a standard website vs the 2008 social network.
2007 Standard vs 2008 Social Network:
- Page views are up +105%,
- Click revenue down -60%, and
- That makes eCPM is down -75%.