So Many Domains, So Little Time

Long term planning has been my albatross. I don't want to do anything with my online properties that jeopardizes the viability of my own success.

I've had a lot of solid ideas, but implementation has been a problem. One of the reasons I've been leery of moving forward too quickly is that I don't want to achieve an algorithmic reputation of being a spammer. Trying to shed myself of that weight would mean changing data centers, setting up shell corporations, and all manner of other things that I just am not willing to do.

I do have interests and plans in some unrelated niche markets, and that in and of itself is a problem. Too many adsense sites, especially unrelated sites will doom the projects before they get off the ground.

Besides that, I need to be able to manage the sites, and the state of many utilities is such that managing the set of security issues surrounding any sort of interactivity is a bit of a nightmare.

This is an area where KDF comes into play heavily. Managing publication from my own codebase where security was a concern from step 1 is a lot easier than trying to mash together other projects. I try to keep my collection of web software to a minimum, but even the basics of MediaWiki, vBulletin, and Movable Type - all pretty stable applications can be problematic. Nevermind that integration between the apps is non-existant other than work I've done.

KDF provides the publication utility with all the freedom I could ask for. It also manages all manners of interactivity - from discussion to voting to custom designed interactions. It produces and proxies webservice APIs easily. And it intelligently manages cache collections, database connectivity, and full text searching. There's also time based event management and spidering / data repurposing built into the framework.

It has been a long time coming, and it's almost here. I have issues myself migrating from server-side programming to client-side programming in different languages. I also have issues managing my own set of requirements in opposition to what others out there might want to do. I'm trying to manage it all through managable abstraction layers and it's working, but it adds in complexity like you would not believe.

Tonight, I found that I have 20 unused domains across 7 vertical markets. That's just plain not good. If I put these sites together seperately and managed just 100 page views a day it would equate to 300 dollars a month in revenue. Build it up to 2500 page views and all of a sudden I'm up to $7500 a month - $15K if I pay better attention to ad placement in congruency with content.

So why haven't I done it? Good question. For me, the primary issue is quality. I don't want to publish a bunch of junk. It's not good for my search engine reputation, but it's really not good for the web in general. It wouldn't be that difficult to attack low volume keywords and pick up 100 page views a day, but it would leave me with a short term plan and not very much real long term revenue.

If I want to sustain numbers over years, I have to build repeat visitors. I can only do that with quality content. Quality content and manageable sites. KDF represents manageability. With a manageable structure underneath the hood, quality content across 7 verticals should be a lot of work, but a very manageable task.

There is much to be said for Just F'ing Do It. There is more to be said for sustainable long term success.

There are three viable basic business models online that I see - big ticket items - $75+ twice a year from a customer, spam and jam - $.05-.10 for every 30 page views all based on search engine traffic, or quality publication - $.05-.1.00 for every 100 page views based on a loyal customer base, SE Marketing, and word of mouth.

I see KDF as a revenue generator, but not directly. I would prefer to make a quarter 2 or 3 times a year from 200,000 users than to sell a 100 copies at $199. Where that quarter comes from, I'm not entirely sure yet. The important part is producing a quality product. Revenue has to be a secondary goal in order to see real success with an open source product.