A few weeks ago I wrote about converting SoccerClub.com to a social network from its original Web 1.0 format and the subsequent revenue drop. The story at the time was that the Google Adsense links took a serious click-thru hit in the new format, even though page views were way up. This confirms the issues that face big-league social networks like Facebook and Myspace, but now it was affecting my “Tortured-NY-Sports-Fan” ticket account. I mean I have a late season collapse by the Rangers coming up in April to attend.

A man has to eat, so I decided to jump into the world of affiliate marketing. The steps were easy to outline:
1) Sign up for affiliate networks — The key was to find networks that offer soccer-related ads. I signed up for a couple of the leading services, Linkshare and Commission Junction, because they represent many of the big box sports stores and some specialty shops, like Soccer.com and SoccerGarage.com. I also signed up for a smaller service called Shareasale.com who represents SoccerPost.com.
2) Upgrade Ad Server — Sounds like a scary high-tech nightmare. It was. I installed the Open Ads software 3 years ago to serve banners on the original site, but I had NO IDEA how it was working. It just did. I had a message in my inbox that suggested I upgrade to the new Open X version, so I figured — why not give it a try and ruin everything. I couldn’t even remember how to do a back-up, so I was working without a net. Well I did it, and it works!! Cue the engineer dance music.
3) Find the banners — This was like crawling through a dark room to find a flashlight, only to learn that you then had to find new batteries. After pulling the HTML code for the banners, I had to figure out how to set up a test page so I could see how to set the display banners. Once again, it worked*. Amazing. So I loaded up the new banners and they are appearing now.

* The asterisk — Technically the banners are displaying, so it “works.” Unfortunately, no one is buying, so it’s not working too well. So there have been extra late-night meetings over pizza between the engineering director and the business manager. However, it’s only been two weeks, so I have continued to expand the banner coverage and monitor the reports to see what works. I have stayed true to the sports / soccer relevancy for the most part. I’ll admit that I slipped in a Match.com link to see how it performs. Ya gotta do, what ya gotta do to pay for those pizzas.

More updates after I let this run for a full month.

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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%.

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