Spin Thicket: Lessons Learned — and People I Can’t Thank Enough

A little less than a year ago, I decided to start a community Web site for people like me — as scary a thought as that is.

I figured that Media Orchard’s success (we peaked in the top 3,000 blogs on Technorati and for about a year averaged 1,200 unique visitors daily) had to mean that there was a broad appetite for the kind of stories that I was interested in. You know — a goofy assortment of news and commentary, filtered for the interests of creative types in media, marketing and PR.

It started out great — in fact, we reached 800 unique visitors daily within a few months, with steady growth — but frankly, at one year in, we haven’t been able to take it to the next level.

In case you’re wondering: I will not give up on this.

Here’s why:

About a year ago, after getting several of my posts on the home page of Fark and Digg and seeing traffic explode, I had a bit of an epiphany. I thought, Here I am, getting 100,000+ hits for a single post – and why?

Because it’s my best post? No — absolutely not. It’s because a single gatekeeper (in the case of Fark or Memeorandum) or a small online clique (in the case of Digg) said it is. I call Digg a clique, rather than an egalitarian community, because it is structured to heavily favor the submissions of a very small number of people. These people essentially call the shots for the site (and, in some cases, have collected money to post content.)

Although I love Fark and like both Digg and Memeorandum, the more I learned, the more I really didn’t like knowing how the sausage was made. I also didn’t like seeing all the ways my colleagues in the business were gaming the system. As someone who came from a print journalism background, the whole process seemed a little seedy to me — certainly far from a meritocracy.

So I thought, what if I could create a community site — for people with interests similar to mine — where submitters didn’t have to worry about being “greenlighted” or making the home page?

That’s why I created Spin Thicket.

We’ve hit a number of obstacles along the way that have been educational, such as:

• Managing Google, which like a light switch decided last spring to reclassify much Spin Thicket content to its supplemental index. We’ve been fighting our way back from that one ever since.

• Overcoming Technorati, which booted us from its index last spring also. I guess you could say that as an aggregator we deserved it — but at the time, Memeorandum, which has NO original content, was being indexed by Technorati, so I figured what the heck.

I don’t mind so much that these things have happened, because the experiences have helped me in counseling clients. I never intended to make money from the site, anyway — just to gather learnings that I could share with others. And that has certainly been the case.

I’ll be candid about something else. When you start a venture like this — as when you take most risks in life — you learn pretty quickly who your friends are. In blogging, there are people who genuinely like you and/or your blog, and there are others who just want to leverage your influence and/or traffic — and who would just as soon see you fail as succeed. There are even those who very much want you to fail.

That’s just human nature, I guess.

So with that being the state of things, it makes me all the more grateful for those of you who have supported Spin Thicket over the past year. You’ve kept our little site alive, and I really, really hope it’s been worth all your time and effort. I am forever grateful for your believing in the site, and when we are able to grow this site to the size it deserves to be, it will be entirely because of you that it happened.

I’d specifically like to say a huge thank-you to the following folks:

• Cam Beck
• Alice Marshall
• Geoff Livingston
• Sara Winters
• Eric Eggertson
• Richard Becker
• Bill Green
• Kevin Dugan
• Constantine von Hoffman
• Ike Pigott
• Gracie Passette
• Owen Lystrup
• Brian Solis
• Katie Laird

I’d also like to thank my wife, Cathy, and my brother, John.

Now, a promise — I plan to keep it going as long as you want me to. You have my word on that.

Update: I meant to also thank our friends at Pierce Mattie PR for including a Spin Thicket feed on their blog sidebar; we welcome others to do the same.

Tags: Digg, Fark, Memeorandum, Spin Thicket