Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 18th May 2009
9 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
The image below here shows why in the age of Twitter, Digg is starting to get less interesting to bloggers. Making it to the front page of Digg is still cool but just as hard (maybe even harder) as it was 3 years ago. Having your message retweeted is a lot easier. Also, 1 Digg doesn’t get you any traffic. 10 Diggs? No traffic. 100 Diggs? Well, only if it makes it to the ‘Upcoming’ section.
A retweet is ALWAYS good for traffic. I just checked the last 10 visitors from Twitter. They had a combined audience of 8116 followers, an average of 800 followers per user. One retweet potentially reaches those 800 followers.
In reality the reach of a retweet is a lot lower, of course. My guess is that a retweet gets an average 5% clickthrough. A link posted to 1000 followers generates 50 visitors. On average. A lot of our posts here get retweeted 50 or 100 times. You do the math.
Now take another look at the graph at the top. That graph is true for Blogs but doesn’t apply to retweets. Blogs need to be original. No point in writing about the same thing twice. Retweets are different. The whole purpose of a Retweet is to, well, repeat.
So, Tweetmeme is twice as interesting for us as bloggers than Digg. Digg is a zero-sum game. You either make it to the frontpage, or not. A retweet is always useful and it never gets dull.
The same goes for Techmeme. Making it to Techmeme is hard. You need to be first AND important enough to matter. I have always been disappointed however when we did make it (i’d say we make it to Techmeme about once a week) because although people seem to think this is a big deal I hardly ever saw any traffic coming from it.
Tweetmeme is a completely different beast. Make it to the front page of Tweetmeme and you see traffic! Lots of it! Which might also explain the surge of traffic to TweetMeme recently:
It is amazing that Digg didn’t/hasn’t/won’t launch TweetMeme functionality and the same goes for TechMeme. Just as Digg took away the throne from SlashDot it looks like TweetMeme is on track to do the same to Digg.
Of course this doesn’t mean we don’t WANT to make it to the Digg front page! If you definitely absolutely want to Digg this post we won’t stop you. Just don’t forget to retweet it too. ;-)
Written on 14th May 2009
4 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Online performance and competitive analysis site Hitwise has compiled a list of the top 10 sites that have benefited from Twitter’s enormous surge in popularity.
Remember these are sites visited after Twitter, usually leaving because the user clicked a link of some sort. Facebook, Twitpic, Myspace and Google all have their own gadgets/widgets and so it’s no surprise to see them up there – Friendfeed is a miss though but at this stage, you really can’t compare.
Below is a graph revealing the various traffic stats of other sites. As BusinessInsider points out, it’s interesting to see Facebooks growth shoot upwards over the last couple of months, particularly since its latest Friendfeed-like ’stream’ release.
On a side note, BusinessInsider have a series of posts appropriately titled “Who’s feeding silicon Valley“, which gives a good overview of who brings in traffic to various successful internet startups including YouTube, Facebook and more – highly recommend you check it out.
Written on 13th January 2009
6 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Rough times call for rough measures. That is why today we are announcing our new advertising policy.
Buy a 125 x 125 or the dog dies.
Okay, maybe not. But we do have new advertising posibilities for The Next Web Blog and they are juicy.
We just implemented the excellent OIO publishing WordPress Plug-In that makes it easier for us and our audience to manage ads.
All you have to do is fill out a simple, one page, form and upload your button. Payment goes through Paypal and the whole thing can take less than a minute.
In less than 100 days we are hosting The Next Web Conference 2009. The months leading up to the conference generally bring a lot of extra traffic to our blog so this is an excelent time to show yourself here.
The new rates:
 |
 |
125 x 125 button
placed in sidebar
7 days
40.000 pageviews
€ 99
Order it now! |
125 x 43 button
placed in sidebar (a little lower)
30 days
160.000 pageviews
€ 99
Order it now! |
If you have any suggestions or special requests (Price for tattoo of your logo on Patrick’s ass available on request) don’t hesitate to contact us.
Written on 31st May 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Doing nothing and getting more traffic sounds like a typical spam promise, right? Well, most of the times it is. But now I need you to get past this prejudice for once – just for once! – to look with me at Scoutle. This Dutch start-up helps you to attract more visitors by just installing a simple widget – a so-called Stage – on your blog. And the best thing is.., these new visitors are probably really interested in what you have to say. Sounds almost too good to be true, so let’s take a closer look.
A Scoutle Stage
Scoutle works as follows: after you’ve installed the Stage on your blog, the service sends out a Scout – a personal webcrawler. This scout “walks through the Internet”. The more visitors you have, the more sites your scout will cover. Its goal is to find other scouts of which some might come from bloggers who have similar interests and profiles. If this happens, you’ll be notified so that you can get in touch with them. When both parties agree on a connection, they can see each others contacts. The result is a new network of bloggers who all have similar interests. They’ll probably start reading each others blogs and send out some trackbacks. So eventually, everybody gets more traffic.
The idea is really good, particularly because bloggers can just focus on creating content while some automatic Scout is looking for possible blog soul mates. When a match is made, they can enjoy each others readings. Almost a perfect execution of modern social networking.
But there’s one danger to it. Bloggers might install the Stage and send out a scout just to gain more traffic. This is not the best attitude for your users. They install the service and wait for their number of visitors to skyrocket. If this doesn’t happen quickly, they might quit the service. That’s why Scoutle may be better off with promoting itself as a service to find valuable blog contacts.
I’m going to give Scoutle a shot, and see if I’ll meet some interesting people these coming weeks. Founder Godfried van Loo told me he is eager for some feedback, so leave a comment if you have anything to add. If you’d excuse me now, I have to instruct a scout to find me some new blog friends.
Written on 22nd April 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Nick Gonzalez, former TechCrunch blogger who used to sleep over 3 nights a week at Arrington’s, just told the crowd at the “Intro to Blogs & Social Media Marketing” Web 2.0 Expo session what he considers to be THE best TechCrunch post ever. Well, this is the legendary article:
The honor goes to Duncan Riley, who wrote a post about Japanese Internet service providers that wanted to ban file sharers from the Internet. According to Gonzalez, it’s not just the best post because it has more than 1000 comments. No, the main reason is that it brought in an “insane amount of traffic”. “Somebody buzzed the story, and somebody else did as well. It ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users”.
Here’s what Arrington said about this spectacular event:
The link went live at 5:45 PM PST as one of the bottom four links in the news box (these send less traffic) and was up through the day. Despite the fact that yesterday was a Saturday (slowest traffic day of the week) and that it was up only 1/4 of the day, we had our highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post.
So in terms of traffic Gonzalez is obviously right. Yet I think that when it comes to blogging, quality is more important than quantity. That’s why I prefer one of Arrington’s editorials to be the no. 1 TechCrunch post ever..
Update: read this post by Oliver Taco: TechCrunch Can’t Do Math
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
