An introduction to a News site

[Razak]

<div></div>Opening a new News site today, just wanted to give everyone an introduction of Why I am starting a news site, and what I am aiming for... come visit at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.norrathliving.com">www.norrathliving.com</a>.<hr size="2" width="100%">Once upon a time there was a man named Gasper. He at some point decided to make a website dedicated to providing news and information about a revolutionary new game called Ultima Online.This man was a machine, he seemed to get information on everything and posted it quickly. His site soon became the most popular location to go to for all UO beta testers, and later live players, to go to in order to find what was happening in the world. He bought a domain and called this site www.uovault.com.Overtime, network of gaming sites took interest in Gasper's little project which and offered him money to let them use his site as a jumping board for a network of similar "vaults" for all sorts of MMORPGs. Gasper happily took the money, and how could he not, and eventually retired from news hounding.This was the beginning of the end for the MMORPG news sites. For a long time, there was quite a lot of competition between the various news sites. Crossroads and Stratics popped up in similar vains, Crossroads then turned into Warcry and then we saw others added including ogaming and mmorpg.com. Many of these sites have become desolate ares full of lame aggregated information that one could easily find on the MMORPG of choice's main page. No work was done, no one cared anymore. Most of the news sites stopped being visited save for a couple. Then IGE.com decided to sweep in and buy most of the few remaining popular sites including Allakhazam, Ogaming, and mmorpg.com. This last step was more than a little disconcerting to me as it meant that the last bastion of gaming info was now in the hands of those who have no care for the actual games they are now giving info for.I decided that now was a good time to start up a news site in which to fill in the gap that there currently lies in the genre. This site is right now news only. Yes it would be nice to have all kinds of info as well like ogaming, but for now I want to do one thing and do it fairly well. The site is meant to be fairly low bandwidth, and yes even plain. If you like all the black background gaming sites with loads of scroll-like images, you will not find it here. This is meant to be information at its purest.Here you will find the latest coming out of SOE about EQ2, but I will also be bringing the news from the community as well. I have already started providing news on a few comic new comic books and videos out there and want to feature screenshots from time to time as well. I want to have reviews of the latest from Sony written by the community to tell you whether that latest Adventure Pack is actually worth the money.This will hopefully become a site where you can keep up to date with what is happening within the game and its community. I hope you join in, leave comments on the news, leave ratings on it, and even submit your own. This site can only be as good as the community that surrounds it.Thank you, hope to hear from everyone at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.norrathliving.com">www.norrathliving.com</a><div></div>

[Swiftsmith]

Hmmmmmm.... news site about EQ2... commercial enterprise... do you bot and farm plat on the side also ? <div></div>

[SenorPhrog]

<div><blockquote><hr>Swiftsmith wrote:Hmmmmmm.... news site about EQ2... commercial enterprise... do you bot and farm plat on the side also ? <div></div><hr></blockquote>I'm assuming your talking about their gooogle ads.  Those generate content based on the webpage.  They have no control over what is displayed.  They'd have to get rid of them entirely.</div>

[Swiftsmith]

I'm reffering to the "PayPal" donation button and the Google ads. <div></div>

[Razak]

The Paypal and the google ads and other advertisements on it are largely due to the fact that it isn't free to host a website, despite what you may think. And I am also not a rich person so I cannot absorb these costs by myself, though I will likely be absorbing most of them even with the advertisements... I do expect to lose money every month for this website even if it got popular, the advertisements are more meant to soften the blow. And yes, I do put a fair amount of time in this site and tus far in the almost week I've been live I've gotten 0 dollars so multiply that by the time I put into it... and I am working for $0.00 an hour, actually less sense I have costs involved, not a great job=P  I'm sorry you feel that the advertisements make the site worse, unfortunately it is the reality of the internet (have been to many EQ2 sites and 95% have advertising on them if not subscription services in a vain attempt to try to stop losing money, so not sure where you go... even these boards are one big advertisement for SOE.) Ironically if I was a platinum farmer I would be more likely to absorb the costs of the server myself as I would have much more money to do so. And I do my best to block gold farming and power leveling services on the google ads, but suffice it to say there are alot of them out there. Have already blacklisted well over a dozen sites and I probably have just scratched the surface.Believe me I would like a free internet too... free for all without advertising needed to support it. It is unfortunate but the last time the internet has been dead for about a decade now... now we have to pay for people coming to the site... though I suppose I could just not allow people to go to the site, that may be counterproductive however.<div></div>

[SlashnGut]

Hopefully you will block many more of the plat sites as I just went on your site and 2 of the 4 ads I saw were for plat selling companies.

[Cyanbane]

I have ran eq2-daily.com since about last August (coming up on a year).   It is an EQ2 only site (ie not in a big consorium of MMO sites with a site/subdomain for each different game) we have a <a href="http://www.eq2-daily.com" target=_blank>news aggregator</a>,a s<a href="http://www.eq2daily.com/discuss/" target=_blank>weet forum community</a>, a pretty decent <a href="http://www.eq2daily.com/wiki/" target=_blank>wiki</a>, and some other stuff that will roll out soon.  I spend a decent amount of my free time on it and this is what I have discovered (take it for what you will):a.) Initially you will always have to pull some money out of your own pocket for a site.b.) It costs money to run a site even after a while.   Our podcasts get about 2k-3k downloads a month, with 50 megs a pop per download, we do 1 - 2 shows a month.  Thats 3.6 terrabytes of data over some ISPs pipe a year.  That costs money.  Bittorrent is nice to offset the bandwith, but there are still people trying to figure out mp3s, so good luck trying to get people to understand BT.   In all honesty to, unless you really know the online ad business then you really won't recooperate any costs via marginal adnetworks (Google Ads, Y! ads, etc).   You need to be part of a good affiliate network (that will convert sales) or know something I don't (and I'm not saying I am a wizard at this stuff).  c.) If you do run Google Adsense you will NEVER be able to filter out all the plat sellers.  Plat seller affiliate domains/sites are fly by night.  usually they experiment with Adwords for a little while figure out it doesn't work and move on hope for organic search results to work and quit buying them.  Then a new domain comes up and does the same thing.  It is ever revolving and unless you want to monitor domains all the time, is pretty useless to try to do it.I guess to sum it all up is this:Unless you plan on really doing this for multiple titles and plan on offering something unique then atleast for the first few months plan on having to use your own flow to support a site like this.What i mean to say is 'give this guy a break', he is using his own time to bring EQ2 news to the EQ2 community.  The game we are all trying to play.  The game we are all trying to gather informaton about.  If you don't like what he is doing then go visit <a href="http://www.eq2-daily.com" target=_blank>us</a> or <a href="http://eq2.ogaming.com/" target=_blank>ogaming </a>or <a href="http://eq2.stratics.com/" target=_blank>stratics </a>or <a href="http://eq2.tentonhammer.com/" target=_blank>TTH</a> or somewhere else.  There are plenty of sites out there and really no need to criticise someone who is providing you with a news delivery service on their own dime and their own time, cause this stuff doesn't make flow.<div></div>

[Razak]

Cyan summed it up pretty well and I've done a few other sites and know what to expect fairly well (ie no one makes money off these sites). I ain't tryin to make money, just tryin to offset the cash I'm putting out for the site a tad. I figure at most I'll make $10 a year from those ads and that won't come anywhere near to offsetting costs, but hey it's somethin!For the plat ads, I do figure I'll be doin it awhile before I actually get a decent number of them out and I'll probably always be dealing with them. Will try though for awhile at least. Personally I find those businesses the bane of MMOs and don't believe I should help spread those around, but like Cyan said I'll prolly never get em all as there are more every day cycling in and out. That being said, I'm more than happy to block domains that people send me. I only look at my front page once or twice a day so I am unlikely to catch em all. Lately when I've gone I've had Yahoo (which admitadly directs you to plat selling but I'm not blocking yahoo), a game guide site (which I'm torn about), a ringtone site (whatever), and a plat farming link site (which I just blocked)... usually the 4th is a plat site and I block 1-2 sites a day. But like I said if you submit, I will block if it is reasonable. I'll also likely be halving the google ads at some point as one of the main reasons that I have so many is because I was trying to catch as many plat sites as possible early.There are a bunch of sites out there that do news... but personally the only other option in my mind is Stratics (which does a fairly good job and the HoCs are great) and EQ2-daily which is mainly a news aggragator which I just don't care for. I don't aggragate, I go out and find em and then try to sum em up for people so that people can get a better sense of whether they want to actually read the article. And then I got ratings so I get a better sense of what people like and what people don't when it comes to the videos, blogs, comics, and pictures I'll post... and also give users a chance to say whether an update is good or bad. It's an attempt to not only give news but give better news without having to sift through it all.<div></div>