Sustainability, Site Longevity, Some History

HOW THINGS GOT STARTED
As I've mentioned before, when I first started up strongandstacked.com, I exchanged some emails with the webmaster of http://www.amazonix.com - a website that featured rendered imagery of muscular women.  When I was contemplating starting up my own website, I asked him what his experience had been like doing that and how things were going.  I had no idea how to start up a website and I need some help and information.  Sure, I did know how to write html. And I knew how to create rendered imagery and animations for a site.  But how did one go about getting things hosted? Getting a domain name for the site?

I exchanged some emails with the Amazonix.com site creator, a guy who is named robtbo on deviant art.  He told me that the way he'd started his website was by contacting the webmaster of dianathevalkyrie.com.  If you've never heard of that site, it has a long history of hosting various types of muscular women content, as well as some big boob and giantess stuff.  He told me that dianathevalkyrie.com had agreed to host a website for him in return for him allowing them to keep half of the income of the site.  So dianathevalkyrie.com would pay for a yearly domain name for him - amazonix.com - and would take care of all the billing and provide a space for him to upload his content.  In turn he'd be responsible for populating the site with content, and he'd have to share half the income of the site with dianathevalkyrie.com.

I mulled this over for a while and finally decided to contact dianathevalkyrie to see if I could get the same deal.  They agreed and thus strongandstacked.com was born.  For my part, I first cranked out a bunch of html pages to create the skeleton of the site.  Stuff like a front door page, a comics page, animations page, etc.  And then I set to work cranking out content.  I set my price point at 10 dollars per month.  I did that because I thought it seemed a relatively modest monthly fee compared to some other sites which I thought had a lot more material (and higher quality material that what I was creating).  So that meant that for every monthly 10 dollar membership, I'd be getting five bucks per month, and dianathevalkyrie would be getting 5 bucks per month.  Yeah, they'd be getting half, but on the other hand I wouldn't have to hassle with figuring out how to get a domain name, and how to set up billing and hosting.  So I went for it.

One great thing about the arrangement was that dianathevalkyrie was, and has been, very hands off. Their attitude is that if I want the site to thrive, I'm on the hook for keeping it stocked with fresh stuff, promoting it through deviant art or whatever other publicity channels I can, and so on .  If it does very well - great.  They get half.  If I don't put much energy into it and it doesn't thrive, not much skin off their back I guess.  They still get half of whatever my monthly take is.




ECONOMICS
I'd had no idea about the economics of all this when I started out.  I wondered at first, naively, whether maybe over time I'd be able to quit my day job.  Yes go ahead and laugh :)  The reality I've experienced is much less lofty than that - more details on that below.  I don't intend to ever get rich doing this stuff.  But I am hoping to get a bit of money out of it.  I still dream of quitting my day job, but my websites aren't going to be the ticket to doing that.  I'm hoping though that they can be a small contributor to it.  For now they provide a little bit of spending money for me but they aren't exactly paying my mortgage :)

Here's a chart that shows how much income I've gotten from Strong and Stacked every month since I started it. 

Now this shows how much money I am getting each month.  The actual monthly income for the site would be twice that, but since dianathevalkyrie takes their 50% cut, this shows what I get after they do that.  And actually this chart also includes income from BEGiantess.com rolled into it starting around July 2012 or so.  That isn't a big percentage of things though.  I started begiantess.com and it has had a small member base and I do have fun working on it, but strongandstacked has many more members and makes more money.

So I've been getting roughly 400 dollars per month from it.  I end up spending some of that money on the site in the form of the occasional commission I pay for from guest artists or in the form of 3d rendering stuff I buy (mostly props and characters and stuff from daz3d.com and renderosity.com etc).  But largely I just keep that money.  So it is some nice spending money, but like I said, I'm not ready to quit my day job making $400 x 12 months = $4800 per year.

I did try to increase my income a bit when I started up begiantess.com. I could write a whole blog post on that some time, but the short version is that I wanted to see if I could start up a second website and figure out the hosting and billing on my own.  I thought, well dianathevalkyrie has been great, but they have been taking 50 percent of the income. What if I could start a second site, and have the overhead be a lot less?  So that maybe hosting and billing costs would be only 10%?  Like I said, I'll write a blog post on it some time, but my little experiment doing that didn't work.  I found a hosting company - 247host.com - that would allow adult material to be hosted.  And I did pay for a domain name - begiantess.com.  Where things really didn't work out for me was with billing.  Paypal will *not* deal with adult sites. *Ever*.  So I couldn't use them.  I went with a company called Verotel.  That worked for a while, but one day in April, 2012, they sent me an email informing me that since begiantess.com was a small income site - less than 100 dollars a month was coming in - they'd need to start charging me 500 dollars a year overhead.  Something like that.  And I had to cough up the money immediately or else they'd shut down my site.  That really, really sucked. I had to deal with that while on vacation away from my computer, and thankfully dianathevalkyrie came to the rescue and agreed to host begiantess.com in addition to strongandstacked.com.  Like I said, I'll detail it further in some future post.  But the bottom line takeaway for me was that I am just going to stick with dianathevalkyrie for my two sites.


I'll try to grow the income base a bit.  But really I think that just comes naturally if you do a good job on your site.  Right now I feel like I'm falling down on a number of fronts. I don't update frequently enough.  I need to create more varied material. I want to make cooler looking muscle women - if I could do anything approaching what Tigersan dos, that would be great.  For boobs I'd point to Ricky Java's work.  If I could create stuff that was even half as good as those guys in quality, I'd be happy. And I think the site would thrive more.  So there's definitely room for improvement.  And this blog is part of that - me brainstorming about ways to make the site better and listening to feedback and suggestions from people.

LONGEVITY, AVOIDING GOING UNDER
Now a quick bit on longevity. I'd mentioned that I asked the creator of Amazonix how he got started and got the idea of having dianathevalkyrie host strongandstacked.com from  him.  If you look at his http://robtbo.deviantart.com and the comments there and some comments on amazonix.com, you can see that he struggled greatly to create content in a timely manner.  And at some point his health suffered - lack of sleep, some sort of heart problem... And right now if you go to amazonix.com you will find that the site is currently stopped dead in the water.  No new content has been created in over a year, and there is a note on the site that says content isn't guaranteed to be updated regularly.

I can really empathize with that guy.  Trying to juggle a day job and various other responsibilities *and* create content on a schedule can grind a person down.  And from the looks of his site, it appears that he may be gone for good.  Another website that features rendered muscular women - http://www.mightyfemalemusclecomix.com/ - has had its fits and spurts as far as creating content goes. It started up with a blaze of content creation, and then just stopped. I think its starting again now.

Looking around at other sites I can point to a lot of examples where websites just slow down and stop.  I want to avoid that with strongandstacked.com.  Begiantess.com too.  Right now I feel like I'm creating content way too slowly.  It's not fair to members. And its not good for the long term potential of the sites.  But I have to also balance the need to go faster with the need to avoid burning out and hitting a brick wall.  I'm hoping the solution is to "work smarter not harder".

One thing I've decided this week is that I'm never doing commissions again.  I already have mentioned something like that in this blog, but its clear to me now that I just can't afford the time sink that commissions require.  I just can't do it and keep my head above water creating content for the site. I  do have one commission outstanding - the house sized boobs one - that I need to finish.  But that's it.  Can't do them any more.

I also need to update my Journal on my deviant art page saying that requests are gone too.  I'm happy to receive ideas, for my deviant art page and for the websites too. And I will try to use some of them.  But I just cannot respond to things like, "Dude, I have this killer idea for a woman who picks a car up and rips it apart then grows huge boobs and rips through her shirt.  Can  you have that done for the very next update of strongandstacked, or put it on your DA page. Thx." 

Instead what I need to do is focus on steady creation of material for my websites and the occasional animation or comic on the deviant art page. I need to carefully write down and record all incoming requests from members - I definitely want to keep getting those - and work steadily through those in a backlog.  I think the key for me will be to do this in a steady fashion and it will be slow and take time.  And there will be requests or ideas that are submitted which I'll choose not to do.  The ones that take way too much time or are too hard.

I want to take in ideas and suggestions.  And I want to try to use them. I just have to avoid getting bogged down in huge time sinks.  And I definitely have to avoid just having the site come to a halt.  I never asked the Amazonix guy what happened to him that made him just stop.  But I'm guessing he just got overwhelmed with his day job and having to crank out stuff and finally decided: screw it. I need to get a decent night's sleep.  I want to try to avoid getting to that point.  We'll see how it goes.