Tysto annual

One year and counting

2005.03.13 — Business | Tysto | by Derek Jensen

This past week marks Tysto's first anniversary in business. Our About page notes:

Tysto was born in a trunk; its mama died and its daddy got drunk. It was named for the Swedish word for "shh." When it was a teenager, it was bitten by a radioactive spider and developed superhuman powers. It attended classes at Purdue University, where it acquired a degree in sarcasm with a minor in philosophy. Then it went to work at a large technology firm, where it was beaten daily and fed on table scraps and wood chips until it escaped onto the World Wide Web on March 7, 2004.

How’s it goin’?

To date, we've published 148 articles, including the secret one that explains Tysto's logo. That's about one article every 2.5 calendar days, altho there was a dry stretch of three weeks in November when we were dealing with clinical depression over the outcome of the you-know-what.

Our massive advertising blitz (telling coworkers about the site and posting links to Tysto on a couple of blogs) has resulted in a paltry 3 rating in Google's PageRank. And a Google search for "tysto" still brings up primarily foreign sites and a dirty story [NOT SAFE FOR WORK] which uses "Tysto" as a man's name.

Oddly, a Google image search for "tysto" brings up tons of images on Tysto pages. A Dogpile search for "tysto" produces plenty of our pages, with our home page at the top. Likewise for Ask, Lycos, and Yahoo.

So it should be no surprise that, in the past couple of months, Tysto has been getting just 6,700, 5,100, and (so far this month) 2,700 visits (separate but not necessarily unique visitors browsing any number of pages in one sitting). This is pretty small but it's 10 times the traffic we got those first few months. So we're reaching somebody.

As a result of all this, our Google and Amazon ads that appear on most pages have netted Tysto approximately zilch in revenue (in 2004 dollars, adjusted for inflation).

What brings you here?

It ain't the free travel advice.

The most popular search terms that bring people to Tysto continue to be babes and war. Presumably, listing them here will make this page the hottest on the site.

diane kruger
janet jackson
"diane kruger"
osama bin laden
bin laden
superman
kirsten dunst
diane kruger troy
kim basinger
american troops in iraq
lisa simpson
hellboy
diane kruger troy
american troops in iraq
diane kruger"
"janet jackson"
love tattoo
troops in iraq
prudential financial
olsen twins
narcissistic
janet jackson pictures
iraq prisoners
narcissistic limbaugh
diane heidkrueger
diane kruger pictures
denise richards
diane kruger in troy
american troops

Where do you see yourself in five years?

In the future, we plan more advertising blitzes, possibly including advertising. Hey, it takes money to make money. Then we'll sell out and go public for a couple of hundred million bucks. Just keepin' it real.

We continue to seek out contributors, particularly the deadbeat friends who claimed they would write an article "sometime" (I'm lookin' at you, Chris and Sunil). Some came thru a couple of times but haven't been back recently (shout out to home boys Wegal, Jason, and Samson).

Now that Andrew Cole has crawled out of his home theater and started seeing movies on a weekly basis again, and now that Roland Grant as begun his campaign to reform English spelling, we can presumably expect a steady output for publishing.

Now, if I could only find the will to care about Social Security reform....

Just to be clear...

Your intrepid publisher is not Chef Derek Jensen. Or Deseret News staffer Derek Jensen, who somehow gets a freakin' 4 PageRank for his lousy contact page. Or Dupage track athlete Derek Jensen. Or Hollywood film grip Derek Jensen. Or author Derrick Jensen.

And he's is definitely not gay porn actor Derek Jensen.

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