So I am working towards starting a gay social site - hopefully it will be similar to gaywatch in the future, but trimmed down to more of the basics (fewer ads and spam-type content).
I want to eventually add some affiliate links, but I know that I need to generate some more traffic before it is worth it.
Do you think there is a market for this?
What are the best ways to get the word out on the site?
I would love any feedback you are willing to give! :no:
Re: Newbie Alert
Depends what you’re going to offer. I would have thought there’d be a market for this sort of thing, especially the way Facebook is so anal about any kind of nudity. But a couple of these types of sites have closed down in the last little while.
It seems difficult to get people away from Facebook. Your biggest hurdle will be attracting guys and lots of them. No one wants to be on a site with 10 active people.
Right now your site doesn’t really tell me what I’m getting, so I’m not likely to join.
To be honest, this sort of thing is not the “if you build it they will come prospect” that people think. You could dump thousands of dollars into this thing and work 100 hours a week and it could still flop. Unless you’ve already spent a lot of time and money, I think I’d move on and do something else. I’ve seen so many profile, hook-up, social networking sites come and go in the gay market.
Sorry I can’t be more positive, but launching a site to compete with the biggies is going to be very tough.
Take a look at Bruizr, it’s a bear profile, social networking site. It looks pretty good and they’ve been at it for two to three years including a misstep by calling themselves Bearbook and getting sued by you know who.
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No - I agree with you - I thought it would be a bit more “if you build it they will come” at first.
I guess I wanted a site that was less segregated into different classes of “gay” and more for the general community.
Right now what I have up is the shell (it obviously needs more umph).
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popping in to welcome you to the forum!
cheers
Luke
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I think there is always a space for new community site, as long you bring something new and fresh. Perhaps you need to concentrate more on either age range or type of your future members and cater for their needs? Let’s be honest vast majority of the "gay community "sites are used to find someone for sex, very very few gays site managed to create community where members apart of uploading videos and pictures adding anything else to the site like writing reviews etc. Creating yet another generic gay community site without some good unique functionalities is a bit futile this days internet is full of them. As a Dzinerbear said you will find 10 active members on them which will put of anyone from sign up.
Another thing, and this is just my personal view… your domain name homohangout, it’s a bit direct, i mean i heard to many f…g homo shouts in my live.
Anyways, hope your site will be a great success.
I have to be honest. I agree with the previous guys responses.
The domain name is not very good. It’s kind of derogatory.
Facebook is the social site to be in, if it’s just for gay guys then it needs to be a hook up site or it will fail and seeing as how there are plenty of them existing already breaking into that market will be almost impossible.
You are running it on a “community software” package that will prolly delete your site once it starts seeing naked pics being posted.
Unless you are going to dump thousands of dollars into advertising and getting a user base it will take years to organically grow.
My personal advice would be to move on and start a porn affiliate blog or something.
This will most likely end up costing you much more money than you would ever make from it.
Re: Newbie Alert
I wondered about that whole homo thing as well. To me, it is very derogatory, but I wasn’t for sure, so I left it out of there. I know where I live, calling someone a homo isn’t anything short of an insult.
But there are ways to do this, but you need to give them something to want to stay there for, like other people have said.
It CAN be done without shelling out thousands, I had a very successful community at one time without ever spending a dime, bt the time it is going to take you to do it will be tough. Get with other community owners who run similar sites, run some cross promotions and branding and get the word out there. It takes longer, but it can be done.
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You’re probably better off running something like that through Date Factories API system.
In fact all program owners should have a look at it. Both POST or Co-reg API.
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Welcome to GayDemon and best of luck with your coming site! If myself or Badpuppy can ever be of assistance to you, please don’t hesitate to let me know. 
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Never thought of that as derogatory… it might just be a location based deal?
I never considered it so… neither has my partner… or any of our friends… here it is the F word that is inappropriate.
Homo is not a nice term.
Re: Newbie Alert
[QUOTE=homohangout;118816]Never thought of that as derogatory… it might just be a location based deal?
I never considered it so… neither has my partner… or any of our friends… here it is the F word that is inappropriate.[/QUOTE]
Ok let’s put this other way, lots of gay guys do think that homo is derogatory and don’t really like to be called like that, another argument is…everyone knows that vast part of gay community /video website users are married men, and even that most of them are gay (married from whatever reason) they still calling themselves Bi because either they don’t want to admit it, sounds more butch or whatever, everyone knows our “bigoted” gay scene(I’m a prime example lol). So in situation when you got just few seconds to grab someone attention, putting word homo is your domain name will be an instant turn off.
Re: Newbie Alert
I don’t think homo is such a bad word. We used to have dances here over 20 years ago that were called the Homo Hop.
I disagree. It’s akin to calling a site something like The N*gger Neighborhood.
Not cool.
Re: Newbie Alert
Bottom line is that some find it objectionable, others couldn’t care less, but you are in business, so why alienate any potential customers? Myself I find it depends a lot on who says the words, such as ‘fag or homo’ and how it is intended. Online you really can’t tell, so again, why risk it?
just my opinion
I don’t think he’s really in any sort if serious business. He signed up for one of those generic build your own community package deals.
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Everyone has to start somewhere, and at least he’s asking questions. There are things I took for granted back in the stone age, when I began in this industry, and if I hadn’t asked, I’d still be chiseling on rocks.
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Honey I thought that’s the only thing you did living on that rock. :sarcastic:
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nah we’ve advanced, we got some new fangled goodie, called paper. I do miss my old Hammer & Chisel though. Least you got a workout while working 
Re: Newbie Alert
Actually I didn’t sign up for a service… it is a CMS.
A content management system (CMS) is a computer system that allows publishing, editing, and modifying content as well as site maintenance from a central page. It provides a collection of procedures used to manage workflow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. - Wikipedia
Like Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress…or even gasp vBulletin (which this site is made with).
I tried oxwall because it seemed to be less clunky than other CMS and had built-in features that would be expected from a community site.
As far as the name goes - I will look into alternatives :-/ I thought it was just funny and yes I am gay and yes I have been called hateful things in the past