Go Sportn

Facebook's new Ticker: What's a publisher to do?

So Facebook holds a giant developer conference called F8 and announces a slew of major changes to Facebook. These introduce a lot of new options for publishers, like us at GoFIShn and GoHUNTn. One of the most pressing and (maybe) promising is activating our sites so that all your activity when you visit GoFISHn and GoHUNTn is automatically captured in your Ticker -- which is a new feature on the right side of your profile page. 

That's a big change from the past, when visitors had to "like" a piece or "comment" on one in order pass along anything to Facebook. 

Don't worry though. Sites can't automatically pass all your activity to Facebook without asking permission first. You might start to see some pop-ups on sites asking you to do just that. There's nothing wrong with asking, but would you accept? For me, it depends on the site. I think my friends would get a kick out of knowing what I read in the morning, especially on GoFISHn, but maybe it's too munch information.

But here at GoFISHn and GoHUNTN, our fans rule, and we would never do anything to cross them. So we asked in a poll on the GoFISHn Facebook page if they would like their friends to see in their Ticker feed on Facebook all the pages they visited on GoFISHns and GoHUNTn. The outcome was pretty one-sided, as you can see below...

 

 

So 66 said "no"; 13, said "yes", and 15 had no idea what the question meant. I take that to mean we will not spend any of our very scarce engineering dollars to fully integrate with Ticker just yet. The new F8 world of Facebook will take time to sink in. Facebook users always rebel at change and then frequently embrace it. We shall revisit this topic! 

 

The big shift: GoFISHn and GoHUNTn go all free in search of more Butch Brown moments

 It's a truim in start--ups that if you stick with your original business model you simply aren't paying attention. So true. 

This week we announced a big change for our sites, our customers and our business model. We made all our pro accounts "free" and ended the $24.95/month fee.

Why? Ask Butch. That's him in the video.

 

Butch Brown is a fanatical fisherman in California who catches largemouth bass like folks have never seen before. When we posted this video, it was only a few hours until this video had 800+ Facebook likes on GoFISHn. Audiences are all about what's mind-blowing, and Butch is that.

We're going all free because we want Butch Brown moments every day. We want people to join GoFISHn and GoHUNTn and post amazing media -- whether it's their own or something they've come across in YouTube. Legions of anglers and hunters carry digital cameras and video recorders (increasingly one-in-the-same), and they are waiting -- and so is the public at large -- for that extraordinary moment. We already see them regularly, and there are more each week. We are becoming the "crowd-sourced" answer to conventional enthusiast media. The value we provide is curation and distribution: we pick the best posts and launch them on our Facebook pages for GoHUNTn and GoFISHn, where we now have nearly 200,000 fans combined. 

In other words, it no longer made sense to limit our access to the best hunter and angler-generated media by asking pros to pay to post, espeically considering they create some of the coolest media. And to be honest we were never comfortable charging these guys anyway. They love what they do, and they are a national treasure. But it's a tough living. 

Our new strategy is to focus harder on big brand advertiser revenues. We're already having a lot of luck doing partnerships that involve posts on our 160,000 fan GoFISHn Facebook Page, and soon we'll start doing the same with GoHUNTn. We're also making changes to our site pages to ensure there is always a nice, fat 300x250 running above the fold in the right rail. You can see the mock-up in the illustration on the right of all pages. Look for this new design in the coming days.

We also pulled above the fold and made smaller the "social" box that keeps count of member fans on Facebook and GoFISHn. This new version counts of how many times fans liked a profile and all the posts associated with the profile. We're going to make that part of an incentive system that will encourage even more posting. Stay-tuned for that and much, much more exciting news to come. -Ned Desmond

GoHUNTn is here

Today we officially announced the launch of GoHUNTn, and we're very pleased by the quality of the posts we're seeing almost immediately! There is something about hunting that lends itself to story telling, maybe even more so than fishing, if that's possible.

Check out this post by about the Minnesota Whitetail deer opener, or this photogallery of great black breat trophies in Alberta, or this wild video about a hunter who shot an emu (yes, an emu) in Maryland.

As we did with GoFISHn, we'll be pushing hard to grow three areas: fans for the GoHUNTn Facebook page, new members on GoHUNTn, and great posts on GoHUNTn.

I am really grateful to a lot of people who helped make GoHUntn a reality. First and foremost is Brian McClintock, my remarkable colleague who did most of the painstaking, epic effort to create the framework for GoHUNTn.

So join GoHUNTn and be the first on your block to win a blaze orange hat with the GoHUNTn logo. All you have to do is be one of the first 100 folks to post a photo gallery of your favorite hunting pictures.

-Ned Desmond