Exxxcavate was one of those projects you look and say ‘i can do this!’ . Its an adventure while i created it, and before i knew it i was doing what i told the employers what i wouldent do and that was complete the site as a whole. We had originally agreed on there budget only paying for me to create the engine and input ( the part that would crawl sites and place the info into the database ). But once that part was finished, i wanted to see it do its thang. “Its Alive” as Henry Frankenstein said.
The jist of exxxcavate was to crawl tube sites like redtube.com and youporn.com ( there was 41 in its engine altogether ) once a minute and grab new videos or update ones already in the database. I used wordpress as the cms and basicly created a plugin for the crawler. The crawler kept a ton of data, some almost useless, but would give a lot of info on the sites it was crawling. If the video sites offered embeding of video, we would take and display the embed on our site – otherwise i would iframe it in ( exxxcavate was to be a clone of metakitty.com ) .
There had always been reason and will to try something in adult porn for advertising, mainly cause there was no true market definition of how good the porn industry was ( as far as marketing and publishing online ) , and this idea was a simple way of testing the waters.
Right away, the peeps who employed me for the project seemed, well, lazy. They never disclosed what they did for a living with me, but they did act like they knew everything to know about internet marketing, but right away – after the project was a week in, one of them asked me “I have been looking at other sites doing the same thing, and they are all making about the same amount of traffic – what if ours only does as good as those ones? ” . And it was true, there were a ton of sites like metakitty, but all of them only did about 5k daily visitors. The competition seemed tough for sure, but i couldent understand why that part of the research wasn’t already performed? I didn’t know what to say, but i told him what he wanted to hear ” we will do better! “.
The entire production of the site to a couple months, and by that time i couldent take any more. For the entire project i got paid about 3.5 an hour, and there was hope for any bump or increase in my pay. Of course they were not obligated, but in America, usually fellow americans pay out more for work done well, especially when you go out of your way just because you have a passion for what you do. This showed there true colors and i was no longer impressed by there attitude.
About a month went by and the site saw little happiness, if any. Soon one of the employers was trying to get a hold of me – they wanted to do more work on the site, and more importantly SEO. At the time, i didn’t know any tricks, and when i told him that, he flipped out on me. He then continued to tell me he was consulted by a good friend who happens to be a SEO expert and he said the site was doomed. I simply expressed that i failed to see eye-to-eye with that opinion and he continued to get on my case about how i was backing down from a huge opportunity. We discussed how the site coulden’t be doomed, but in fact just needed more and lots more attention. By this time, the employer was pissed – and i could tell from the beginning he was having a bad day, but obviously needed to vent it on someone.
I began to be fed up with the phone call and told him he needed to find someone else for the SEO work. For some wierd reason he decided that attacking my character would better put me in my place. Eventually he cooled down and simply got off the conversation. Later was contacted by his partner and told that it was a mis understanding. Well – i didn’t care, because they were cheap, and now a#$)(*les in my book.
Later the same one who called me out, later asked me to do some touch up work. I obliged and performed the work. it was nothing huge, about four hours. When i was letting him know the work was done, i told him i had placed my Donations paypal button on my site if he had a little love to share ( 4 hours of friendly work is worth something, right? ) . He replied “Fuck Donations, we want this site to make millions and you can be the Lead Developer ” . I said “That would be great, but faith dosent feed my kids” .
I never talked to them again.
The site never really got any attention that it needed, and at one point they had boughten a chunk of traffic for the site, which actually crashed the site. I had warned them a sudden burst of traffic might knock it off line and we would need to be ready for a traffic increase. I installed google analyitics for them, but they couldn’t seem to get to the data ( odd, right? ) . There main Faults ?
1) You don’t talk down to your developer. If you ask him if he can do SEO work and he admits he dosent know much, that is a noble person and should be respected as such. It takes a real man to admit faults or weaknesses and i pride myself on that. Be happy that a person will admit they can’t do a job before accepting it. Don’t just be a whiny-ass baby who can’t afford a 50/hour seo person and would rather pay your cheap ass developer another 4/hour .
2) You never ever stop working on web sites. These guys were under the impression that you could make a site, and the next month without doing anything, your site would be raking in the dough. This mentality is from the late ninetys, and was 60% true. Now, it is not possible…. well, i would say %5 often make something and it eventually makes a little bit of passive income, but often that attracts the developer to work on it more and that makes it soar. So yeah, you can get away with doing little work, but it can’t cease.
3) Don’t be a dick – people will like you more and share there compassion for the work instead of just the need for money.
I am more then happy this project failed – because of what was said between the employers and myself. Had they had listened to me ( and obviously, had more capitol ) , we could have made it worked.
I just want to take this moment and snicker on behalf of there humiliation
David Kilmer – While They Sleep
