The Progressive Politico

I was approached by the owner of The Progressive Politico, Lionus LaVida, with an interesting idea. He wanted to create a website that would take over the following of Politico.com during the presidential transition.

This project was new ground for me in a few different ways.

The first thing, and probably the most important thing I didn’t even realize until afterwards was how much the project depended on the outcome of the presidential election. Being that the website is a Liberal based political news source it wouldn’t have been as much of a success if the Republican party had won.

Another focus of the project that I realized from the beginning was that Lionus wanted to use the website as a source of revenue. I have had quite a bit of experience in advertising on large scale news websites such as the Atlanta Journal Constitution due to my experience at COXnet. The issue arrose when it came to finding a open source program that would be affordable, easy to use, and supply all the statistics and tracking that I needed. I co-worker turned me towards OpenX, an open source ad serving platform that can be installed on your server for no charge. See my previous post about OpenX. Due to the website being new and not having a history of statistics the only advertising that we were able to do was affiliate advertising and Google Adsense.

We launched the Beta of the site November, 1st 2008 and during that month we made a very big push to get a lot of visitors to the website. This was the third objective to the site. We made a few graphic banners with the site’s logo and slogan and put it up on the client’s blogs, myspace, facebook, as well as commenting on a few large myspace and facebook groups that were based around liberal politics.

After all was said and done we had 11,807 page views, and over 1,000 unique visitors within the first month of the site being live. We carefully tracked the statistics for the site during the first month and we noticed that the daily impressions and visits dropped tremendously during the holiday week, which suggests that if it had been a regular week we probably would have hit close to 20,000 page views and 1,500 unique visitors.