So Chris and I have recently rebuilt and relaunched a new (old) site – tastyfood.tv, a cooking and recipe website. The site was orginally purchased by me from a good friend of mine, Tim O’Shea (owner of Blurtit.com ). I purchased the site for a very modest sum, I wanted it as it had over 8000 videos (hosted on the server), quite a large proportion were original, home made types however, a percentage were from TV programmes so there was a slight concern with copyright.

To cut a long story short, we have completely rebuilt the site but tried to maintain the original look as this seemed to work well and ther use base is largely repeat so we did not want to make any radical changes. We have teamed up with a professional chef and we have complimented the site by adding a wordpress site as well where our chef writes high quality pieces for us.

The long term aim is to build a user base that uses the service to showcase their cooking. One major change is that the upload facility has been restricted, it used to allow people to uplaod any video, way too dangerous from a legal point of view as we do not have time to vet all videos and also, we cannot really easily make a call on what to allow between copyright content and regular free use content. Copyright video content is an ongoing and growing problem. So what we decided to do was to allow YouTube to be our editorial so now, you can only upload videos which have previously been posted on YouTube – that way legally, it sets a precedent for “public use” and if any corporation decided to make a case, they would likely chase Google well before they chase us.

I will keep you posted of how we get on.

Nigel

Postscript:
In the last 9 months we have been manically busy when I look back: we have seriously restructured the monetisation of CSP, build Answerhero.co.uk and worked out a domain strategy for it, rebuilt TastyFood and relaunched it, nearly finished with a brand new ad-platform for CSP, written this blog, had loads of fun and also… recently purchased ukoffer.com – a place to find the best deals online – it really has been busy – not to mention we have had a blast along the way. As with all our sites – if you have an idea about working with us, please contact me to talk further. nigel “at” cspmail (dot) co (dot) uk

Currently, we are working out what to do with it, our overall intention is keep it as a “latest offers” and voucher site. Our plans are likely to involve extending the categories and encouraging greater consumer participation in some way. Time will tell. Meantime we have our hands pretty full adding new pages for relevant offers.

If you have any interesting ideas on working with us on the site, please contact me directly: nigel “at” cspmail.co.uk

This year – we are seeing the impact of the recession as many stores simply cannot afford to strip out any more margin from their already, overly discounted prices.

It is not all bad news though, some stores such as Argos are freezing the VAT increase in a bid to clear out 2009 stock. Additionally, DSGI have really ratcheted up their competitiveness and for the Dixon’s January Sale they have taken things one step further and are naming stores they will guarantee to beat the price on!

It will be interesting to see which retailers finish their January sales in January and which provide an extended sales period.

We found it worked pretty well but monetised at a much lower rate than the rest of the site as it was all very long tail stuff. Then we found a major problem… for every page in the new Q&A section, it was limiting the opportunity for results in our more valuable shopping comparison section.

We can’s prove it 100% but it would appear that our site (CSP) has reached a limit in the overall number of pages that we can get into the index (without a large increase in inbound links) and thus we are actually hurting ourselves by growing more pages with less commercial value.

We therefore made a decision to hive off lots of Q&A data and set up live on a new domain: AnswerHero.co.uk (as you will know if you have read this blog).

So anyway – we thought great! that will do for now. But oh no…. because we kept our Q&A functionality live on CSP, over the last few months our Q&A database has grown massively even though we have tried to restrict its activity by having AH outrank it for the long tail stuff.

So what we have decided to do is this, we have taken a radical axe to our database on CSP and deleted 90% of all Q&A and also stopped any new manual posts going up. I think at some point Chris will migrate the deleted files to AH but not sure when. Once Googlebot sees they are gone, hopefully it will then rank our shopping pages back higher.

The moral of this story is that it is important to evaluate what pages you have in your site and what value they bring so that if you have a large site with lots of semi-profitable pages compared to other pages, consider if it is worth keeping them at all.

Trending Topic: Fishing on AnswerHero in our general Sports section

view the questions about “Weddings” here

Trending Topic Page: swine flu

The biggest trending topic here: Aliens in Gifts

Below are excepts from the lastest trending topics:

Gifts
how do i make alien egg with goo have babies?

Jewellery and Watches
how to tell the difference between real and fake links of london Friendship Bracelet?

Other
how do you know when aliens from the planet scardox are pregnant?

Gifts
how long does it take an alien birthpod to have a baby?

Babies and Kids
how many matalan stores do fancy dress?

Jewellery and Watches
how to tell if genuine links of london friendship bracelet?

Health and Beauty
how long should i stay home after swine flu?

Jewellery and Watches
how do you tell if links of london sweetie bracelets re genuine?

Gifts
do ozbozz aliens have babies?

Gifts
can alien toy in egg have a baby?

Gadgets
how to takeapart x rated snare bike?

Jewellery and Watches
how to tell a fake links of london friendship bracelet?

Outdoor Living
how to put wire in strimmer?

There are a few ways to go about getting paid content as you may be aware of. The simplest way, and by far the least cost effective is to pay a content firm to write on the site. This would not be the way forward for us, just to recap why; the whole basis of creating AnswerHero is to try to build and run a site in various countries, from the ground up with minimal investment and make it work so that other webmasters can follow our successes and failures and generally enjoy the journey with us.

So back to getting content…. paid is out, so we figured why don’t we use an incentive scheme which pays vouchers? We use this on our main site, CompareStorePrices.co.uk and it works really well so we started the process of migrating people to answer on AH.

The way our getting paid to work at home system works is listed on Answerhero – become an AnswerSuperHero page and also below. It effectvely works out that we pay a tiny fraction for the content from what we would if it was normal paid. You generally pay between 5p and 12p per word for content. On our scheme we end up paying somewhere like 0.7 of a penny per word!

Also our AnswerSuperHeros can work any hours that suit them and do as much or as little as they want.

We fully envision that we will end up with a small army in each country, providing the ad revenue will pay the costs then we can extend it quite a lot.

AnswerHero Rules

We decided that we wanted to differentiate the logo in some way to show users which country-site they were on. It was quite tricky as trying to incorporate a country flag anywhere on the body of the logo made it too small. Initially we looked at having a flag on his chest, but that was too small a space to work with so was no good, then we tried making a bandana with the flag on it. This just looked a bit odd. We also tried his cap in the country flag but it was not clear enough. In the end we settled on a solution which works (we think) really well.

Our designers (Stylemix LLC) did a superb job of it. Below are all the variation we did. By the way, the transaltions you see are meant to be “Find Your Answer” which we used Google Transalate to do. If we have made a glaring cock up, please feel free to tell us how stupid we are here in the comments. but also tell us the correct wording… When I did it I checked the reverse translation back to English and apart from the Sweden one being plural, (Find Your Answers, which is acceptable we think) they all made sense.

www.answerhero.co.uk

www.answerhero.dk

www.answerhero.fr

www.answerhero.com

www.answerhero.de

www.answerhero.it

www.answerhero.pl

www.answerhero.es

www.answerhero.se