Bar.com Development Blog

I keep trying to focus on a sustainable, long-term business model for this domain. I’ve been toying with an idea for the past week or so and I’d be very curious for YOUR comments.

Manage here, share/display anywhere. OK, the mission statement would need a little wok. But essentially, imagine a hub for bar owners where they could maintain all of their business details that they want to communicate to their customers. Of course, there would be the essentials like business hours, phone number and address. But the next generation bar manager will need more. They may have upcoming events, upcoming or regular drink specials, they may want to announce a new beer they have on tap, etc. If you put some thought into that, you’ll come up with all sorts of things a bar owner may want to keep customers up to date on.

So now imagine the typical bar owner trying to update this information on all type of areas of the web… there would be quite a bit of duplication. Her own web site, her facebook page, maybe a few tweets here and there, foursquare promotions, and so on. Why not help them manage all of that from one place… and where better then bar.com? This can all be achieved with a well conceived bar.com API (which your truly could build in his sleep).

At this point, keep in mind we’re talking about a long-term strategy here

Monetizing this would b very simple (and my personal favorite money model, which accounts for the majority of my personal income on other sites) - subscriptions. Bar owners pay a monthly subscription to be able to use all of our tools. Because all o the major social communication sites/tools have APIs, we can automatically handle postings to those places for our bar owners.

Now think along the lines of building a profitable company around this, instead of a “developed domain.” How many bar owners need a new website? Why not create a installable piece of server software that taps into their bar.com API and dynamically displays their website? So we could charge Joe’s Bar a very minimal fee for this software (and even install it for him on our cloud hosting platform). Joe’ paying a monthly fee for this service and things like that would keep him around for awhile. Hey, and maybe Joe even needs a domain name, but all the good ones are taken… why not register joes.bar.com?

I think you get the point. And the good news is that with the city portals the groundwork is already laid to begin this process. So I’m very curious (and feel free to be brutally honest) - what do YOU think?

Unfortunately, we got the typical canned response with absolutely no insight into the questions that were posed. I’m not really surprised, but it would have been nice to get a sentence or two back from a human… oh well. Time will tell if there was a suppression in place and if that request helped to lift it a bit.

A bit of good news… Traffic is up about 13% month over month right now across all areas of the domain. This increase is coming specifically from the city portals. In fact, traffic to the main areas (www, home & beer) are actually down. Many of the cities are showing some nice promise. Dare I say… something might be working here?

I put in a reconsideration request this morning. I thought it might be interesting to post here with the request details I put into the Google Webmaster Tools section:

Some time back, we had a ban lifted on this domain. I’m taking a shot in the dark on this, but am guessing there may still be some sort of suppression in place. In fact, it may be algorithmic and I would be very interested to hear from someone due to a natural oddity of the domain:

As you may know, the words “foo” and “bar” are common placeholder names that many people (programmers mostly) use when explaining things. So there are a large number of natural inbound links to the domain simply because it is a common placeholder name. An example would be a help forum post like this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=859541

or a company that is describing something to its users like this:

http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=5040

So we are very curious to know if these odd inbound links are somehow penalizing us. Perhaps we just don’t have enough original content yet, but our traffic from Google searches seems oddly very low. Any thoughts you can provide would be very interesting.

Thank you.

It’ll be interesting to see what (if anything) comes back.

I’m not one to accept failure. And in many ways I keep thinking about my last post as being just that. I can’t accept that. I do think the best course of action at this point is to remain idle on the project though (while keeping up with maintenance of course). I feel in my gut that the city portals will eventually evolve into hubs of solid information for the local nightlife enthusiast.

There’s an explosion of social media going on right now. So much of it is location-based and many of these new services are fully equipped with an API. For instance, foursquare has an API that could be very useful for local venue lookups. And Yahoo’s Upcoming API could also lend some useful information on similar topics.

Perhaps the future of the domain is a mega mashup that brings many of these types of location based services under one roof, specifically for the local bar scene. Maybe bar.com can position itself as a one-stop shop for bar owners to tap into many of these services from one central location (for a small fee of course). Time will tell… and many of these types of services are in there infancy. For now, let’s see how the city portals do. For the bar managers that do submit thier establishments, they’re certianly committed to providing a nice amount of quality information. Check out a few:

http://chicago.bar.com/saddle-up-saloon
http://milwaukee.bar.com/in-the-drink
http://houston.bar.com/jet-lounge
http://chicago.bar.com/nacional-27
http://tampa.bar.com/coyote-ugly

So we’ve pretty much tried everything in the book on development of this domain. I’ve come to a major realization over the past few years as I’ve played with this domain and a couple other “premiums:” holding a premium domain is not an excuse to develop. Instead, it seems that holding a developed property that needs a boost in recognition/brandability is a great reason to buy a premium domain.

The newest initiatives on the bar.com domain show promise for the long term, but just how long that term may actually be is the question at hand. In it’s present state, the domain is getting new bar submissions and bar management requests at a rate of about 1 each per week. The new drink recipes section seems to have solved the issue of people finding the recipes they were looking for…. but it also seems to have reduced the total amount of page views they would have otherwise spent trying to find that information.

For now, I’m going to have to let this project run as-is to see if the long term will allow a city or two to snowball. I’ll keep up with management of user generated content and see if anything that’s been created begins to stick. As it sits now, the domain holds a nice page rank and is slowly growing organically in the search engines. It’s definitely doing better in this state than a raw parked page. But for at least the next handful of months, I have to keep my attention to the project diverted. That’s a tough statement for me to make, but sometimes you’ve got to face facts.

I’m pretty convinced at this point that Google has a suppression on the bar.com domain. I would guess it’s a left-over suppression from the ban that was lifted on the domain a while back. That being the case, I’m going through and auditing all areas of the domain to ensure we’re not breaking any rules. I didn’t really find the time to do blog posts as The Foo anyhow, so I’m bringing his page back to the way it originally was.

There are a number of reasons why I think we have a suppression, but I’m not going to list them all out right now. Instead, I’m going to give it a solid month and then go through another reconsideration request to see what comes out of it.

About 10 minutes ago I rolled out the new layout and marriage of the city portals with the main domain.  As you may recall, this was being done to make improvements to the drink recipes section in an attempt to attract repeat visitors.  The city portals were designed in a far more robust manner than the main site was.  At it’s core was a powerful framework, but it was using it fairly statically. I don’t even want to get into what all needed to take place in order for the newer system to accept a ‘www’ subdomain as a city that’s not really a city. And let’s face it - you’d probably appreciate me not getting into it. So know this ladies and gentlemen - we now have a butt kickin’ infrastructure fully loaded with user-based functionality that we can build upon for this site.

I don’t have the drink recipes section completely done by any means. In fact, most of the features are not made public yet. The marriage of the 2 system took far longer than I had hoped and I just wanted to get the dang thing live. More (much more) to come (of course).

Our beer blog writer came to me the other day and asked me if we could give his local liquor store a discreet page on the blog.  In exchange, that store agreed to supply the beer for his tastings.  Although I feel the real estate on the blog is substantially more valuable than that, I agreed to the deal.  The taster has agreed to take a portion of the monetary earnings from that specific area of the site in exchange for his work there.  Given that the blog is currently only receiving about 10 unique visitors a day his earnings are almost nothing.  I calculate that just his beer purchases must be around $100 per month, so he’s actually losing money to work on this right now.

That brings me to the reason I wanted to start the blog in the first place - to see if Google was suppressing the domain.  It’s been up a few weeks now and the traffic from that source has been very minor and very long tail.  I won’t be able to feel comfortable stating that to be true unless we see the same pattern for at least a couple months.

I’ve got quite a few hours of this week dedicated to getting the drinks areas up to speed so I hope to be reposting here soon about new functionality.

1. So all of the city subdomains have now been created and have all been loaded with bars and featured suburbs.  I have to admit, that was about the least fun thing I’ve done in a while, but now it’s on to the good stuff - jumping back into development of the drink recipes section and cross-subdomain integration.  Right now, the city portals aren’t all that pretty.  But soon they’ll be improved with some additional content centered around beer and drinks.  So in case you’re curious, here are the current active cities in the system:

Albuquerque
Atlanta
Austin
Baltimore
Boston
Charlotte
Chicago
Columbus
Dallas
Denver
Detroit
Houston
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Las Vegas
Los Angeles
Louisville
Memphis
Milwaukee
Nashville
New York
Oklahoma City
Orlando
Philadelphia
Phoenix
Portland
San Antonio
San Diego
San Francisco
San Jose
Seattle
Tampa
Tucson
Washington

Couple of side notes:

1. Bing really likes this domain for the city searches.  Google seems to hate it.  Yahoo is slowly dipping it’s toes in the water.
2. The beer blog is going well.  It’s one of my favorite reads right now.
3. I’ve been tweeting links to the beer blog posts and we’ve increased our audience there by almost 20% in just the past couple weeks.  Looking forward to doing the same (similar anyhow) with drink recipes.

It’s official - The beer blog is live!  Check it out at beer.bar.com.  My plan is to work content generated from the beer blog into other areas of the domain via RSS feeds.  But for now, I simply have most areas of the domain linked to the beer blog.  I’m focusing on the goal of getting things all setup the way I want them by the end of the month.