Last month, Y Guy, aka Korry Rogers, added some new features to Yuwie. Presumably this is because he has noticed the number of people who have abandoned the site for a myriad of reasons and is trying to attract people back. Additionally he no doubt wants to attract new users and has hopefully not had his head stuck so far in the sand that he is unaware that the site has developed a bad reputation, for spam among other things.
The first new feature, the Member's Market, is similar to features on other networks where users can buy and sell one another. Essentially it's a harmless game, although some people have opted out either because the idea of buying and selling people, even virtually, is abhorrent to them or for other reasons. At best, it's a harmless time waster, but has the potential to become a cliquey popularity contest.
The second feature, video messaging, using something called JabberClub, allows people to send video messages to their friends instead of the usual picture comments or messages that are typed. Since I am not wild about allowing myself to be recorded, I haven't actually used this feature. But considering that I have only received one video message in a month, I would guess that it isn't wildly popular. One friend also pointed out the possibility of abuse that exists whenever you allow yourself to be recorded for any reason.
The third feature allows you to opt out of having ads appear on your Yuwie. Basically, if you fill out one offer, you will 1) help Yuwie's rsr (revenue sharing rate) by doing so and 2) get all ads removed from your Yuwie experience for a week. Now this one is pretty funny, actually. If you run Yuwie with Firefox as your browser and if you use the NoScript add on, you can control this all by yourself without having to fill out any offers whatsoever.
The fourth feature is Twitter integration. Twitter is one of the fastest growing sites on the internet where you can post updates of 140 characters or less which will be seen by your "followers". Now you can have your Yuwie blog headers, etc. appear as updates on Twitter. I guess it's as good a way as any to get attention to your blogs.
Late last week I had intended to post a tongue in cheek blog on Yuwie. It was based on the assumption that, since my page views had gone way up since the new features were implemented, Yuwie's numbers must finally have gone up also. I was going to say that since I was posting Yuwie's Alexa numbers, I must be guilty of negativity since everybody else who has ever posted Alexa numbers has been accused of that. Of course, the joke was that this time the Alexa numbers would be UP.
The joke was partly on me. When I got to Alexa, here is what I saw (more or less, I'm using today's numbers):
Traffic rank (Website popularity) - down 676
Reach (% of Global users who use the site) - down 3%
Page views (% of Global page views) - up 11.7%
Page views/user (Daily page views per user) - up 16%
Bounce % (% of visits consisting of 1 page view) - up 1%
Time on site (Daily time on site) - up 28%
Search % (% of visits from a search engine) - no change
Page views are up, users are down. Hm, fewer users, more page views? All that means right now is that the people who are still active on the site are getting more traffic. As of today, more people are still leaving the site than are joining. Well after all, these wonderful new features are things that are already available on many other sites. I doubt that anybody who is really "cutting edge" is all that impressed by them. Still, if some people are getting more active, maybe they will manage to attract more people and keep them active. Additionally, word is that the long promised music player feature is coming very, very soon.
A music player will help (though I see a huge can of worms opening re: copyright issues), but if Mr. Rogers wants to return to Yuwie's glory days, perhaps he might consider:
1. Fixing all the constant error messages that people get when posting comments and so on
2. Actually communicating with his users when there are a) problems and b) new features and nipping the rumors in the bud
3. Finding a way to make the ads less intrusive without people having to complete offers
4. Making the site more user friendly (see Multiply)
5. Making the site different rather than a second rate copy of MySpace
6. Allowing those people who are interested in money to post their business opportunities in a business section of the site so that the rest of us don't have to deal with the constant spam
7. Allowing those people who are interested in money to see all the referrals that they are getting paid on, not just the first three levels
8. Find a way to keep the help desk open (at least to receive reports) 24/7 so that people who get error messages, etc., don't have to wait until Monday to even be able to report a problem.
9. Why not allow people to opt out of the money making side of things in exchange for not seeing the ads? Let's see how many people are really NOT there for the money!
10. Start a user group to make and discuss suggestions for the site
Or perhaps we should all go back to MySpace like Mr. Rogers suggested? Oh wait, I didn't come to Yuwie from MySpace.
For some reasons people have left or are disenchanted with Yuwie, visit this discussion that I started on myLot:
http://www.mylot.com/w/discussions/1986214.aspx
Monday, 8 June 2009
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