One Year Anniversary of HubPages

On August 5th of 2006 we launched HubPages. TechCrunch wrote a post, we invited friends and family, and we were off. The product was an early beta, which means bugs and usability issues. That first day we had about 15 thousand pageviews and then traffic went down to a few thousand a day shortly after the launch

We closed July 2007 with 4.5 million visitors and over 10 million pageviews by Google Analytics.

We tried some early marketing with contests and buying search terms. They didn't really work. Then in November of 2006 we started cracking through Google results. As the word spread, so did the number of Hubs. Then as Hubs grew, so did traffic. About 85% of our traffic comes from search engines with Google the number one source of overall traffic and Yahoo the number two source.

While we don't disclose individual earnings. A few people became very sophisticated at creating highly targeted niche content and earning a few thousand dollars per month. When we built HubPages, we guessed that it would be a small number of people that would drive most of the traffic. This has been true with a small number of authors that contribute most of the quality content and get the traffic

As success of the site began to grow, so did the spam. It was frustrating for us to see comment spam and scripting of the site to create poor Hubs. To combat the spam we implemented many tools to catch it. With small development teams, resources are tight. While we would have preferred to build new features or improve existing ones, we put substantial resources into fighting the negative content. We continue to spend significant resources fighting spam. I wish we didn't have to do it, but it is a necessity or the site would get quickly overrun.

c-home $7

c-shopping $9

c-automotive $9

c-business $9

c-blog $15

c-internet $15

c-careers $15

c-travel $18

c-money $24

c-finance $28

The lowest CPM is books at 62 cents.

One of our goals is to make HubPages profitable in the next 12 months. We track the CPMs of the top tags. Good quality niche content in the top earning categories can be quite lucrative.

Recently we updated the Terms of Service to prohibit adult content. This was primarily a business decision. We hope to work with brand advertisers in the next year. Having adult content on the site prevented these discussions from moving forward. It was a difficult decsion, but we believe it is in the best interest of the site.

We wanted to create a service that allowed people to easily create a topical webpage, drive traffic to it with search engine optimization, and help them monetize their work with expert monetization.

In October of last year we began to productize our managed monetization service. It's now in private beta and we are very excited about offering other publishers an automated platform that increases yields by algorithmically placing and formatting ads.

On HubPages, we have seen the click through rates climb on average as we improved the technology. We now see CTRs average over 5%. We are pleased with these results and expect to continue to improve the technology rapidly over the next year.