Tysto annual

Two years and counting

2006.03.10 — Business | Tysto | by Derek Jensen

This past week marks Tysto's second anniversary in "business." I put business in quotes because we aren't really making any money. Oh sure, it's been a bang up year of articles and images, and horoscope entries have skyrocketed (thanks to Mark Beckstrom), but the feedback has been weak to comotose. Traffic fluctuates wildly.

January saw a record high of nearly 10,000 visits while February saw a 12-month low of just 2,200 visits. Stats for February are strangely spotty, which suggests there may be some technical issues in the background that caused some underreporting (12 days with single-digit visit numbers; that's suspicious).

How’s it goin’?

To date, we've published 236 articles and postcard pages. That's about one article every 3 calendar days, compared to every 2.5 days last year.

We haven't really caught the attention of any major blogs, let alone legit journalists. I was really hoping for a bump after catching Al Franken in a goof on his radio show and posting a comment on his site with a link to Tysto. Al got a piece of hate mail (he reads hate mail on the air for fun) that called him anti-Christian and claimed he said, "You're annoying me." Al was baffled by this and said that he'd just hosted Paul DeVries, president of the New York Divinity School, the day before and he never told anyone "You're annoying me."

But I remembered vividly that Al had interrupted DeVries in a moment of rambling and kidded on the square, "Now you're annoying me." I hoped that Al's helper monkeys would have noticed my comment and that he would have corrected himself on air, giving Tysto a massive boost and catapulting us to D-list notoriety like Atrios, but no such luck.

What brings you here?

Contrary to last year's claim, maybe it is the free travel advice—or at least the postcard pages that bring you here. I now get about one request per week to use some of my photos in a published work—generally some municipal brochure or something. I always grant complete free use of my pics on Tysto and on Wikimedia Commons because I'm just happy someone gives a crap about what I'm doing here.

One very nice German woman has made two requests regarding pics of the Roebling Suspension Bridge as part of a German celebration of their native son, John A Roebling. We've been communicating by e-mail with machine translation that is working remarkably well. I write my reply in English and copy a translation from AltaVista's Babel Fish; and she writes in German and copies a machine translation to English. I wouldn't conduct a romance this way ("I wish to embrace your hinder parts, if the condition suits you"), but for photo licensing, it's fantastic.

The most popular search terms that bring people to Tysto continue to be babes, but travel photos are now big also. For some reason, my one article on Superman continues to be a heavy draw.

diane kruger
cincinnati
superman
statue of liberty
jersey city
cincinnati skyline
terrorist
cincinna-
manhattan
newark
bin laden
manhattan skyline
cincinnati-
diane kruger troy
city night
osama bin laden
manhattan night
empire state -
paul brown-
manhattan at night

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Having seen average monthly traffic almost double from about 5,000 to about 6,000 visits in just one year, we now expect to see traffic duodeca-nonuple to 174,000 visits a month by next year. How are we going to do that? We will create a plan, and then execute against it; that's how.

In the absence of contrary evidence, I'm confident that this approach will succeed in helping Tysto achieve its true potential: domination of the semi-weekly socio-political analysis/opinion Web magazine market. You may call this plan Bushian, or even Rumsfeldian. Fine. Just don't call it late for dinner, mister.

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