As Pligg approaches v1.0, Digg-like sites powered by Pligg and other systems are becoming more and more popular. The idea of a site created with user-submitted content is seductive. But here are some things you probably don’t know about what it’s really like to launch a Pligg-powered site.
First, let me say that none of this is a criticism of Pligg. I’m a Pligg fan. I’ve ported two templates to Pligg, which have been very popular, and created a third template as a place to start for people who want to create a custom template of their own. And I’ve written a couple of posts about understanding Pligg template files and hacking templates.
And none of this is meant to discourage you from starting a Pligg site of your own. I just want to start a conversation about some of the challenges facing Pliggers and others launching similar sites. If you have a plan for dispelling these myths, you’ve probably got a good shot at a successful site.
Myth: A Pligg Site is a Turnkey Solution to Web Publishing
Reality: There’s very little turnkey about it. There’s a lot of management involved. Just look at the Pligg Admin Panel. What do you see? User Management. Category Management. News Management. Comment Management. Module Management. That’s before you even click on Configure Pligg.
Myth: I’ll Customize This Template in No Time
Reality: Pligg is still young, so there’s a dearth of templates available. How long is it going to take for people to get tired of yget, or any other template. And customizing or making your own templates is not as easy as you think. Pligg is much more complicated than, say, WordPress. That’s not a criticism. Pligg is powerful out-of-the-box. But trust me, digging into Pligg templates is not for the faint of heart. If your blog is on Blogger, you’re going to have your hands full with your first Pligg site.
Myth: A Pligg Site is a Surefire Way to Generate Traffic
Reality: You won’t get traffic just because you throw up a Pligg site. Even if you fill it with stories from feeds, it won’t be enough to create a stampede. Sure, you’ll get a trickle of traffic, but it won’t convert very well.
Myth: People Will Flock to Join My New Pligg Site
Reality: It’s not as easy as you think to get active members. Look at most Pligg sites and you’ll see very little activity from outsiders. You can always spot a hopeful, lonely Pligger: all of the stories have the same number of votes, whether 3 or 5 or 10.
Myth: My Pligg Members Will Create Quality Content
Reality: Most of what gets posted by members is off-topic, and most of what’s on-topic is usually of questionable value. In fact, most of what’s likely to get posted to your site is spam.
Case #1: Upstart Blogger had an associated Pligg site, the Upstart Blogger Grapevine. When I launched it, I offered to contribute $1 to Pligg for each person who joined and posted a legitimate story. No response. It gets some traffic because I have a good domain and I’ve posted all of the stories myself, but there’s not much happening there.
Case #2: My first Pligg site was devoted to stories about the future. Browse Futurosity now and you’ll see stories about everything from Discover Horse Tack Trunks to Hysterectomy alternatives video about uterine fibroid embolization. Nicely done and informative to PopThatZit.com Pimple popping videos and pictures to No more sites blocked at work or school. Lots of stories about web proxies.
Myth: Once My Pligg Site is Up, It Won’t Take Any Time to Maintain
Reality: Managing a Pligg site takes more time than you think. Not just because you’ll have to stay on top of the spam if you want to create a quality site. You’ll also have to manage comments and users, tweak and fiddle, market, maintain, etc. In short, if you want a quality site and not a dumping ground, it will take as much time as creating quality content of your own and posting it to your blog.
Myth: Once My Pligg Site is Up, It Will Be a Cash Machine
Reality: You’re unlikely to make a lot of money from advertising. Pligg visitors tend to be drive-bys because the real content isn’t on your site, but somewhere else. I haven’t read any great Pligg success stories (see How profitable is a Pligg site ? in the Pligg forum).
Myth: It’s a Ground Floor Opportunity, Launching Before Pligg v1.0
Reality: The opportunity to claim a niche with a Pligg site has probably already passed. Remember, a Pligg site is an imitation of Digg, and how many imitations of Digg are there? It seems like this is just the beginning for Pligg-powered, or Digg-like sites.
Maybe this is like staking out some territory with a blog, long before there were 7 million bloggers? The blogosphere feeds on itself. The more good blogs there are, the better it is for your blog. But unlike blogs, the more Pligg sites there are, the less valuable your Pligg site is. Blogs can trackback and pingback each other, but are you going to link your Pligg entry to another Pligg entry?
What Now?
I haven’t given up on Pligg. My Pligg sites are dormant now, I don’t have the energy to fiddle with them. But when Pligg v1.0 is released, I’ll be giving it another go and trying to address these challenges. What works for you?
email me, I can help. There is a new blogger society coming online. I can get you an invitation.
I just totally agree with you. I knew it would not be so easy, nothing really is.
I am just being patient because I like both my Pligg site and the topic it is about, and I know that I receive visitors, only that they fear interacting too much with the screen, they just enjoy looking around, which is also good, I guess. I think it’s a cultural issue: not so many people are already used to some Web 2.0 interaction, but as I said, I’m still being patient. I will give up when I lose my patience :)
By the way, I learnt quite a lot with your Pligg posts. Keep up the good job!
I agree, most users of my site are just lookers and I only have about a half dozen submitters that have only submitted at the very most twice. However, the topic invokes a lot of passion and slow steady growth is what you really want anyways. More people become involved and become users/contributors, versus being passersby.
Slow growth is fine, as long as you manage your own expectations of how long it takes to build a community and you have the time to fight the spam. It’s like tending a garden—while you’re waiting for the good things to grow, you have to keep pulling weeds.
sorry, but this was just a total waste of a read, i thought it would actually say something of interest. all your remarks are pointless. I gather that you were after the fast buck and no work also to have thought about having to write this.
a few comments on your post to give you idea why it is pointless.
1 quote: “There’s a lot of management involved. Just look at the Pligg Admin Panel. What do you see? User Management. Category Management. News Management. Comment Management. Module Management.”
A. erm, so you planned on just pressing install and sitting back ? how many scripts have you seen that do that ?? very hard to manage a category, never tried a forum ??
2.Quote: “Myth: I’ll Customize This Template in No Time”
A. If you have problems making a template for it and you can not afford to pay a designer, then how do you expect to run a site in the first place and pay for advertising (as your whole post is about being good site, is it not?). i notice you never mentioned 1 word about advertising in your post.
3. 4. 5. ” all about traffic and content”
A. well remember in 2. that we are not paying to advertise and in 1. that you can not be assed actually running a site as too much effort.
6. Case #2: My first Pligg site was devoted to stories about the future.
A. well what can I say, all I can do is just quote what you said “everything from Discover Horse Tack Trunks to Hysterectomy alternatives video about uterine fibroid embolization.”
well after that quote, now we can realize why traffic was shit. They are the things I search for every day, and just what I was looking for! cough cough.
7. quote: “Myth: Once My Pligg Site is Up, It Won’t Take Any Time to Maintain”
A. are we not repeating ourselves again ? we are getting back to the “you should not have a site in first place if you are not going to actually run it”
8. Quote: “Myth: Once My Pligg Site is Up, It Will Be a Cash Machine”
A, well, so far, we are not bothering to run it as it is too much effort, we are not going to advertise it, as we can not make a desen’t design and can not pay a designer, hence we don’t have money to advertise, hence your PR is so bad, who the hell will advertise on your site or click your awful adsence ?
I will just skip the respt of teh boring stuff and go to last comment.
Quote: “What Now?I haven’t given up on Pligg. My Pligg sites are dormant now, I don’t have the energy to fiddle with them.”
A. well that was the perfect phrase to sum up your whole post about pligg / running a website.
Summary: this post was obviously made by someone with absolutely no experience in website creation, advertising, project planning or business planning, it never has anything to do with the script you use, it has everything to do with the webmaster that uses the script.
I do not have anything to do with pligg or affiliated with it in anyway, this is a digg at this post with anoyence that someone can blame a script simply because they do not have the expertise to simply advertise and the Quote: “energy to bother”.
why write a full story on how you can not be bothered.
let me rewrite this in short for you;
If you are lazy, do not have any capital to invest in advertisng and can not actually create and maintain websites, DON’T BOTHER MAKING ONE!
I think that was what you were actually trying to say ?
regards
Matt
Hello
I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don’t have anything to say recently.
Bye
Hey,
looks like Matt is adding just the kind of controversy this post would need to create a lot buzz.
—
I have some ideas about pligg promotion. I haven’t tried them out myself yet so I don’t know if they are effective, but I thought it might be beneficial to mention them here anyways.
It seems to me that bloggers and webmasters are dying for free PR and traffic.
How about contacting them (ones that are related to your niche) and encouraging them to submit something, FREE ADVERTISING!
I realise the majority of that will be like spam; Just self promotion. But if the people you contact are close enough to your niche then won’t there be some posts of value?
Also, why fear the spam? Doesn’t the voting nature of pligg mean that unpopular posts (like blatant useless spam) will drop to the bottom and the good stuff will rise to the top?
With a starfish ;) like digg/pligg in a way you are not really the owner. The users are the owners. Maybe “letting go” is the biggest step toward creating an environment where people will contribute.
But like I said at the beginning I haven’t tested any of these ideas out yet, so use a grain of salt.
I don’t know, what do you guys think?
@toritaiyo: Your first idea of asking other bloggers to submit something might be a good idea, if you pick the right people. The problem with spam is that if it takes over your site before you’ve established a legitimate community, you won’t attract the right people. Good people see the spam and just leave, so the spam doesn’t get buried and you don’t have a chance to establish enough good content and good partipants. That’s what happened to Futurosity.
If you have a large enough, established community of committed people who are invested in the quality of your site, then you can “let go” and trust that the community will police the site. But it’s not that easy to do.
Thanks for the Reply!
You have a very good point. I can see the problem more clearly now. That is a tough one…
And this point is good too:
“If you have a large enough, established community of committed people who are invested in the quality of your site, then you can “let go” and trust that the community will police the site.”
So I guess that the trick is to find a way to get the right people “invested” in the site.
Any ideas about how to do that? If you could launch futurosity over again, what do you think you would do differently?
p.s. this post has been really helpful. thanks
I think the best solution is to build a base of good people by inviting them. That’s what most social sites do. They have a beta period where people participate by invitation only. You keep growing the community by weeding out the wrong people and letting the right people invite more people like them.
That’s a good idea. I’m glad I asked.
But it makes me wonder how some other sites, like Wikipedia got to where they are. They didn’t restrict membership, which to conventional wisdom was crazy. If I were to guess at the reason for their success I would say that it was because they have a mission that people could believe in (a free encyclopedia). But I don’t know, maybe they started with just a core group as well…
I don’t know how Wikipedia got started, but I do know that it had a core group of people dedicated to its success. That kind of support is hard to attract with a site that isn’t unique, focused on a niche of passionate users.
I don’t agree with the “ground floor” thing. Digg is terrible for anyone looking to find any real information about a niche topic. I can find WAY more real information about SEO and internet marketing in 2 minutes at Sphinn.com than I have ever found on Digg.
I personally think that Digg will eventually die. The only thing that makes me hesitant to make this statement is for the useless sites like Myspace which still seam to be doing okay. So.. let me rephrase my statement. Digg will eventually become an epicenter for complete trash.
I think people aren’t looking for news. They are looking for news about politics or news about rock stars or news about SEO. They are not looking for whatever junk is at the top of Digg right now.
I’ll agree, I’m sure it is difficult to get users when there are many other sites so similar competing.
However, not so much with: Myth: I’ll Customize This Template in No Time
Look at my site! (Linked in my name.)
Still, it’s based on the default, and perhaps people will get sick of that. But the myth was not based on how great a template we could make.
I think Drupaligg is much better option.It is flexible, powered over Drupal so creating forums/blogs is relatively simple and it is available open source.Download from http://drupaligg.programmingbulls.com. The live sites on Druapligg are :
http://mymobilepals/com
http://minkit.com
Pligg is open source too.
There is also PHPdugg.
but none of these change the question this post presents: Is starting a digg-clone worth it? separating hype from reality.
S.E.O is a blackart sometimes and because on SERP’s changes things can not always goto plan, especially with the semantic searches and WEB 2.0 networks that can alter things on a daily timescale as opposed to years ago when things were far slower.
http://socialcmsbuzz.com/yet-more-proof-of-pligg-ripping-code-straight-from-social-web-cms-projects-svn-11082008/
Unfortunately, pligg in its current state, is a non sequitur. Those nit wits are doing everything within their power to muck things up…. err.. too late, it’s already done.
J.
Nice write up on Pligg is cool to use.
Thanks
http://www.webartsense
Hi, well I thought the same way, I opened up one with the Beta 9.9.5 version modified its template urls .htaccess and created a really cool drop down menu. and… let it sleep for a while. Then when V1.0 came a few months ago the wistie template is exactly like the one I created for the Beta 9.9.5 especially the friendly SEO part and the drop down menu.
What also very noticeable is that the response time is much better and I think that this is why my pligg site is growing again, we have more than 100K visits per month and our alexa is lower the 100K. It looks like the people in Pligg finally did it.
Thanks for this great article I wish I read it a year ago when I opened urSelections, but if I look back I learned a lot working with the earlier version to appreciate the new one.