Monthly Archives: July 2008

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Last week, GayCities was mentioned in Hilary Howard’s Comings and Goings column in the Sunday Travel section of the New York Times. Unsurprisingly, traffic spiked immensely and many more people were introduced to the site than ever before. Obviously, I’m thrilled at the jump in traffic and overall traffic has stayed at a much higher level since our PR campaign in June.

But what is most interesting was the quality of the traffic. On that Sunday more users submitted reviews, blog post comments and new listing submissions than any other day in our history. And it was significantly more than proportional to the traffic increase. And these reviews were thoughtful, detailed and of high quality (not the “drive by shooting” type of reviews we’ll often see from Google searchers who land on the site).

This phenomenon isn’t new. People have talked about how Yahoo! Buzz has not only outpaced Digg in terms of traffic driven to a site, but that the quality of these more mainstream users is higher: they comment more and join a more thoughtful conversation. In many ways, people in the valley think that getting “dugg” or being written about on TechCrunch is of value – and for our launch it did help quite a bit, but I’m guessing we got a lot more people that are jaded by technology and just come by for a “looksee”. Our users from the Times were much more targeted and actually passionate about travel – clearly a better fit for a travel site and a good place to target future outreach.

And one last surprise, people who work in travel actually read travel publications. We got a number of sales leads from the Times – people looking to advertise with us. From TechCrunch, we got a lot of people trying to sell stuff to us.

Has your experience been the same?

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I can’t believe that it has been a whole month since we relaunched GayCities and told the world about it. I want to thank you all for the supportive emails and comments – while it’s hard work building a company, it’s nice to know that people have got my back.

Traffic keeps hitting all-time highs – Since the relaunch we keep having our “best traffic day ever” (this past Saturday hit yet another record). And more importantly, now even the worst traffic day is better than the record high prior to the launch. I like seeing that.

Making progress on the ad front – with our ad network, we pitched and won (and are running) a deal to promote the city of Toronto as a gay friendly destination. It involves sponsorship on the site, media on our site and co-marketing. We’re pitching the idea to a few other cities and a European country. There is a business here 😉

Awaiting an amazing press mention – For our launch we got picked up by the SF Chronicle, TechCrunch (and re-syndicated on the Washington Post) and Inquisitor. Now we’re waiting for an mention to hit in a HUGE publication. I’m super excited about it, but don’t want to Jinx it until I see it in print. Stay tuned…

Starting hiring – The workload has gotten too much to handle, so I’ll be looking to build up the team. Initially I’m looking for a permanent part-time person to handle content updates/community management and for a full time jack-of-all-trades person to help run the business with me.

Thanks again for all the support. The rest of July we’re kicking off some marketing to small business owners, doing more marketing to consumers and setting up meetings with potential investors. It’s gonna be a busy summer.