Chicken and egg problem - as a viewer (not a bidder), why should I visit a site that is nothing more than a sponsored advertisement? And if nobody visits, why would anybody bother to bid for messages?
Indeed, that's the little experiment. People want to post a message in a place it'll be seen, which is why they propose at baseball games or write on bathroom walls. The question is finding a high-visibility forum.
The incentive here, at least at first, is that if there are less than 11 bidders, you don't pay anything. So in that case, the proposition is "Write on our front page for free," and the only loss is time. Beyond 11 bidders, the market sets the price.
Agreed, you are missing an important element. There has to be an overriding reason why I should point my browser to your page or grab an RSS feed (assuming you have one). Can I win $100 a day by visiting your page, etc.? Find a hook.
No, I think they've got it right. All they need is one hit, one winning message, that'll drive traffic to their site. Once that happens, other people will want a chance to get some exposure there.
The one thing I would suggest is that they add an RSS feed and some syndication tools, and broaden their distribution on the net.
"Drive traffic" is still the problem. If 10 people a day visit and a person gets 2 hits out of getting their link on the page, they won't be back.
If 10,000 people visited the page each day, and having a link on the page guaranteed 1,000 visitors, you give motivation for people to relist their link.
Another part of the problem is targeting: bad marketing is all about trying to get everyone's eyeballs, great marketing is about selling the guy who is starving for Mexican food a taco.
Because it was a new and interesting idea with lots of chutzpah.
Million dollar homepage is the kind of idea that can only work once. Its draw was that it was novel - anyone who tries to copy it is no longer new, and so people don't care. Same goes for Leah Culver's etched laptop: she got sponsors because she got publicity, and she got publicity because what she was doing was new and interesting.
We make people check out at PayPal when they bid, so that we can automatically charge them later. If there are less than 11 bids when midnight ET rolls around, we never send that charge. I take it that we should word that more clearly on the bidding form instructions?
There's no way I'm going to go through all that and trust you to make it 'free', when, to be very blunt, it's barely worth my time in the first place. If I want to add links somewhere, I'll go comment on popular blogs.
Despite all the negativity above, I just wanted to say.. I kinda get a feel for what you're trying to do and there's definitely a good idea lurking in here somewhere. I am reasonably convinced your present implementation is not /quite/ right, but as long as you're agile on your feet and respond to what feels the right thing to do, you might end up with a hit.
Turning these sorts of ideas into hits is a bit like landing a helicopter onto an invisible boat. There's no target, you're just flapping around in the breeze, but if you delicately push it the right way, you might end up with something (or nothing).
You might want to consider starting out with 10 messages per week (or 3 days, etc.). You're ultimately creating artificial scarcity. If you reduce the supply of messages further and thus increase the price, it's likely you'll see higher quality messages -- which in turn should drive traffic. You can "prime the pump" by starting with a longer message lifetime.
The disadvantage is that you may train users to visit weekly instead of daily, which is obviously counterproductive to driving traffic.
We decided to keep ads off the site because they're not as interesting as people writing things they genuinely want to say. The vibe is like Best of Craigslist.
Since there are only 10 messages that go up, we can screen manually.
