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There’s been a conversation at Net Marketing Forum over the past few days over the imminent launch of HitSilo.
One of the important points brought up was whether it was “The Right Thing To Do” to open “Yet Another Traffic Exchange”. The consensus seemed to be not to, but I’m still trying to figure out if I can understand the rationale there.
There were several prominent points which were argued:
1) The question of whether or not it’s correct to open a new exchange rather than improving the old ones. A lot of folks argued that rather than going ahead with Hitsilo, Logiscape should get back to the “abandoned” Hitpulse. To which Logiscape responded that Hitpulse was still doing relatively amazing in comparison with a lot of other exchanges (even new ones) in the market today, and while they continue to maintain and improve, (this is my interpretation from here:) there comes a point where you have to stop adding features to the old exchange because it will become an unmaintainable mountain of crap with no resemblance to what it originally was (being a software engineer, I can totally see this happening) and if you’re going to “re-launch it” just to keep that from happening (like a major version bump) then why bother? If it’s performing reasonably well, let it run and give the major version bump a new name.
2) There were a lot of numbers put out in a discussion of how well the old ones were performing, but the truth is that neither side can objectively claim to have authority. Logiscape’s numbers are obviously the only correct ones… But that’s if you believe them (I personally do, still using their “smaller” exchanges myself with good consistent results, but allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment). On the other hand, are publicly available stats (although I’m still not clear from where) that clearly show a drastic drop in all of Logiscape’s exchanges over the past 3 months. But again, they’re still alive to one degree or another.
3) This was brought up by some of the heavier hitters in the TE world: why isn’t Logiscape using e-mail campaigns to maintain a high level of interest and activity in their exchanges? To which the unspoken response was Logiscape’s long-term policy of not over-mailing their members and customers. No complaints from me here, although the point is a good one, and it’s frankly odd why Logiscape would NOT use it’s 500,000 email addresses to market other products and make oodles of more money there? (Again, no complaints from me 
)
4) The most ridiculous point brought up against them, in my opinion, and the one which sparked this post, was the claim that it wasn’t fair that Logiscape was opening another super-heated exchange, which would inflate their existing market share in the industry and make it harder to compete with them. Well, DUH! If I was a shareholder at Logiscape, that would certainly be my goal. That’s how business works in a capitalist world. Survival of the fittest, and all that.
5) Finally there was an issue of market saturation and attrition of existing exchanges as folks left in search of “the next big thing” (this is actually what sparked point 3 above). Logiscape claimed that it’s the inevitable doom of all traffic exchanges, to which the response was that it could be avoided (or at least alleviated) by marketing better to their existing subscriber base to get them to surf more.
I don’t have any experience running a traffic exchange, so maybe my opinion doesn’t count, but it seems to me that from a business perspective there’s nothing wrong with what Logiscape is doing. Music artists put out new CDs, movies and TV shows have sequals, authors put out books, serial entrepeneurs open new businesses – why shouldn’t a traffic exchange company open a new exchange?
I suppose we’ll see where everyone really stands when we see who promotes Hitsilo come launch day…
(And one last point – speaking of launch day, I understand with reserving the pre-launch to folks on the pre-launch list, but I really have an issue with the 3 hour advance notice. In a 24 hour day, somewhere in the world some affiliate’s gonna get screwed because the 3 hours will start and end while he or she is asleep, or at work, or out at the cinema. I’d be pissed if that was me, so I’d like to ask Logiscape to come up with a way to give folks some ballpark time – maybe just announce it in advance on the prelaunch list? – so that no one has to lose out.)
At first, I was going to dump them in the waste basket. But, as I joked to a colleague, I could just visualize some poor fool scratching himself and suing (we’re located in a spiffy tower with a gorgeous ocean view; while we do have the restroom to ourselves, other people could go up or down a floor and use it – and anyway I had this idea…)
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