Facebook games, CCGs, board games and Mr Football

Today I announced the first public demo code for my new project tentatively titled Mr Football, which is an Australian football management simulation game which is intended to launch across Web, Facebook, iPhone/iPad and other mobile platforms throughout the year. It's just me building it on my own, folks, so it's not going to be speedy. The reason I'm blogging about it here on my largely neglected Tinfinger blog is that (a) I like to post feature-length dissertations for historical purposes on this blog, and (b) in researching Mr Football's ruleset and technical structure, I had a lot of thoughts which I would like to get down in pixels while it's all swirling in my head.

First, a bit of an explanation as to the influences behind making this game. FanFooty, while it is an excellent site of which I am very proud, does not consume all of my time, especially in the offseason. I am thus left at my leisure in the sunny months, whereby my idle mind turns to thoughts of new projects. I got hooked on some Facebook games this summer, two of which are significant influences on Mr Football: Atomic Moguls' whitelabel game for CBSSports.com called Franchise Football, and EA Sports' Madden NFL Superstars. Both of these games launched in 2010, with at current count Madden holding steady making good use of its official NFL licence at 1.8 million monthly active users and Franchise Football trending downwards at a mere 68,000 without licence or player images.

Both of these games are, like many of the insanely popular games from Zynga and its clones like Farmville and Cityville which are introduced in this GamaSutra series, based on collectible card games (CCGs). You click, click, click and then click some more until you get enough of the in-game currency to buy a virtual item. Rinse and repeat until you collect them all... ah, but when you have the full set, they bring out more stuff for you to collect. The items are intrinsically worthless, having only the virtue of scarcity (to start with) and social investment. There is no strategy to success apart from faithful repetition, unless you have real life cash to speed the process up.

The analogy with card collecting is made even more stark in Madden NFL Superstars because instead of choosing the players you want on your team, you have to buy randomly seeded virtual card packs and hope that your favourites fall your way eventually, just like collecting real sports cards. Both of these games are highly limited in scope, which is I think why Franchise Football is falling away to nothing and Madden is levelling out in popularity - although that may be seasonal as the NFL draws to its January close.

The main structural problem with these games is that they are linear, not cyclical. There's a progression to collecting the best items, then after that it's a dead end of boredom watching your perfect set of numbers tick over like cells in a spreadsheet. There's no "management" game there at all: no tactics, no choices, just maximising totals. The game makers have to keep creating new items to maintain interest, Zynga-style. That's all very well when you are Zynga working your own intellectual property, and can think up endless new items to throw at players (though I'd argue even that has its limit). In sports games based on the real leagues, however, you can't make up new players.

Given that the CCG market itself went through a revolution more than a decade ago with the advent of Magic: The Gathering, which combined the collection formula with legitimate gameplay mechanics, I am surprised that Facebook game developers have chosen to stick with the old paradigm. It seems to me to be a no-brainer to adapt successful M:TG tropes, which themselves rely on the ancient technique of rock-paper-scissors to add contrast and factionalism to gameplaying. In short, M:TG cards come in five colours which corresponded to five different types of card types which enable varied playstyles, some of which are better or worse at defeating others in a rochambeau manner. If MT:G's current owners Wizards of the Coast had their shit together, they might have dominated Facebook by now, at least among their nerd demographic.

Thinking about all of these things led me to go back to an old favourite game of mine: Blood Bowl, which I have blogged about before on these pages (five years ago, really??). Go read that post for background, but in short, Blood Bowl is a board game based on American gridiron football with some intricate and well balanced league rules for creating and maintaining franchises over time with rules for building and developing many different kinds of teams with a lot of replayability. The game was embraced and extended by the site FUMBBL.com (which is still going strong) into an online gaming community juggernaut with myriad complexities unforeseen by the game's creator. As in the first paragraph of that old post, I felt that this along with the aforementioned elements were training me to brainstorm something better, using bits of the old plus my own creativity.

This has led to the carpet in my apartment getting a bit ratty lately, as when I am thinking hard I tend to pace, and there's not much room to wander at my place. Over the course of the last three weeks or so, I have dreamt up and am now coding my response to all these inputs, in the form of a game which I hope will bypass the flaws of previous efforts. Like Blood Bowl, every random element is resolved via structured dice rolls, although in this case I am taking advantage of the whole thing being computer-based to roll far more dice than a real life board game player would be able to withstand without getting RSI - something I learned from the Civilization video game series, which is effectively the world's most complex board game.

Unlike Franchise Football and Madden, in Mr Football players are developed, have a good run and then age and retire. Also, you can't just buy the best players with money, you have to pick them in randomised drafts when they are young and undeveloped. In fact, Mr Football has no currency for buying items or players whatsoever at this stage. This subverts the collection mechanic at a fundamental level, and means that teams will rise and fall in cycles as good players come and go through your list. Trying to fight the cyclical nature of sport and instead build an lasting dynasty will be the core dynamic of Mr Football.

You may ask: if there's no items to buy in microtransactions, and Facebook apps are notoriously hard to monetise through advertising, where's the beef? I didn't say there would be nothing to buy. If the core gameplay is sound, then I am hoping that players will pay money to expand their ability to play. This will mean having regular pay-to-play tournaments, divisions, leagues and special events. FUMBBL has developed a number of good ideas for this sort of thing, so I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here.

That's not to say that I think I have thought everything out already. Players of other games complain about various game mechanics that encourage cheesiness and gamesmanship by coaches to gain advantage. At FUMBBL it's "cherrypicking", where coaches are able to beat up on lesser opponents to pad their win stats and avoid injuries. In Franchise Football it's "sandbagging", where teams load up on draft picks of good players in lower divisions despite their teams being good enough to advance, thus making things harder for teams that do want to progress. Fans of Madden have started to emulate the Zynga hardcore users by employing third party scripts to abuse the gifting system. They can now spam 40 gifts at a time to other players on Facebook and accept 40 back per day en masse with a single click. It's madness, really!

In this vein of minmaxing, I fully expect the real AFL bugbear of "tanking" to rear its ugly head in Mr Football. Under the current draft rules, coaches will play to lose for dozens of games on end despite having a good squad, just so they can get better draft picks to go on a dynastic run in the future with a crop of great players drafted in successive seasons. I'm not sure how to combat this... though to be frank, neither is the AFL. Unlike Andrew Demetriou, though, I don't have the luxury of putting my head in the sand about such a crucial issue of competitiveness and fairness. f I get it wrong, the game will suck and ultimately fail.

That's all to come in the future, though. At the moment I'm still enjoying myself immensely, in the early stages of architecting what I hope will be a very good product. It's a lot of fun to make, hopefully it will be a lot of fun to play. :)

A template for an Australian HuffPo

The thought of an Australian Huffington Post is one that has occupied the minds of those greater than I ever since HuffPo laid down the template for a professional group blog that would become so huge as to rival newspapers for size of audience and breadth of coverage.

I've been thinking about how to deliver this concept in the Australian market for a number of years now. On various occasions, I have tried to interest others with complementary skill sets in the local Web community to start this venture with me, Voltron style. Building an MTUB supergroup seems to be in the too hard basket for now, and I'm busy with FanFooty for the moment, so I think it's safe to publicise my thoughts on this without fear of giving up precious defendable IP.

The first and most important thing to note about building a HuffPo for the local market is that the model will have to be significantly different to the original, if only because Australia doesn't have nearly the same economies of scale that publishing in America does. With a population 15 times that of Australia, American publishers can afford to appeal to relatively narrow niches and make traffic targets up in volume. Crucially, American news blogs can also afford to have a relatively low number of pages per visit due to their high number of unique browsers. Local blogs like News Ltd's The Punch, Fairfax's National Times, Text Media's Crikey and New Matilda (deceased) survive (or not) on a handful of page views per user. This is unacceptable, given our lack of critical mass of users in the target market for such publications. Thus the site must be built around generating repeat visits, user loyalty, and interactivity to keep them engaged.

I'm assuming here that anyone who wants to build such a site is not going to have anything beyond basic seed funding, with maybe a bit of angel money. Such person/s would probably have experience in both the journalism industry and also be a part of the local Twitterati. These two factors would mean that the vexed question of how to generate content early doors from limited financial resources would lead to reliance on one or both of these constituencies, without payment. This was the case for BackPageLead, for instance, whose contributor list was built from the old journo contacts of ex-journos Ashley Browne and Charles Happell. The Punch's contributors are mostly News Ltd hacks slumming it online, politicians and other spruikers pushing a line, with David Penberthy recruiting the occasional Twitterati superstar like Bronwen Clune to spice things up now and then. Crikey's attempts at blogging beyond their core politics beat (and their paywall) have been abortive, to say the least.

The HuffPo model has always been not to pay contributors anything, even now when the enterprise earns millions of dollars in advertising revenue per year. They have been able to do this because there is a large number of urban intellectuals in the US who get shut out of the opinion columns of mainstream newspapers like the New York Times but still want to have their voices heard, regardless of remuneration. This has lead to accusations that HuffPo is a mouthpiece for celebrities and the rich.

In my opinion, this lack of ability and/or inclination to pay contributors in the Australian context leads to an unsatisfactory result for all concerned. The spruikers are participating for their own selfish reasons, so they aren't interested in building your business, only pushing their own barrows. Their disconnect with the audience, at whom they are barking their message, leads to a lack of comments and a lack of follow on page views. Readers have something to bitch about in the short term, but ultimately it hurts their engagement with the brand. Slumming MSM journos also have their own agendas, be they political or professional, and they are not trained to produce that subtle blend of srs bsns and troll that constitutes quality comment-generating linkbait in an online environment. More to the point, they seem unwilling to learn such skills, with their heads still mired in newspaper country.

No, the only way to develop such talent is to pay them, I reckon, so that you have complete editorial control over their development as specialist bloggers. At the very least, if you want to maintain the HuffPo model for scaling content outside your core of paid bloggers, that's fine, but you have to set the tone for the rest of the site by instructing those bloggers to blog the way you want the publication to go. These are probably not going to be MSM journos who are retrained, because it would require abandoning the habits of a lifetime, not to mention actively attacking the basic tenets of newspapers if not their business models. They are probably not going to be recruited from the upper echelons of the Twitterati either, as I have found from my (admittedly feeble) efforts.

There's a chicken and egg situation here: how to make money in the short term to pay these bloggers? News Ltd and Fairfax have the money, but they're not going to give it to the likes of Penbo to spend on actual bloggers, because they have a hard enough time justifying paying all the old journalists on their books as it is. The Punch and the NT are milksops of the online community, emasculated by their parent companies so that their only possible goal is to block a real HuffPo clone from destroying their hosts. Crikey doesn't have the money either, limited as it is by its newsletter income and unable to bootstrap the content outside its paywall to sufficient levels of traffic to garner significant advertising revenue.

All of these factors lead me to believe that a successful HuffPo clone in Australia has to start outside the strict HuffPo model of journalistic-style blog content. The Punch has come the closest in its ongoing liveblogging of Question Time, but it's still way behind the one I think has the only chance to work in the Australian context. This technique is stolen shamelessly from my own experiences at FanFooty, so feel free to denigrate it on that basis, but it's what I know and I think it could work outside the sports ghetto.

The key is to liveblog as much as you can. Liveblogging, when done right in a technical sense, is arguably the greatest page view generator you could have on a blog. This means developing your own code to run your liveblogging pages. Specifically, chuck that CoverItLive crap, or any other Flash-based solution, straight to the shizenhausen. Flash chat is unwieldy, ugly, unmanageable and, most importantly, restricts your repeat page view count to make it almost counter-productive to liveblog in the first place. You must invest in creating an AJAX solution with autogenerated page refreshes to drive up ad impressions. I can not stress this point enough. This includes video- or audio-based liveblogging through sites like Ustream or justin.tv, where you can still have an auto-refreshing text chat in a frame with the live Flash app in another frame (for an example, see the live audio podcast page I built for the weekly Coaches Box podcast).

For those thinking that this is a rather evil little trick to inflate page views that would hurt advertiser ROI, I would argue that if you get people watching the same page with its dynamically updated AJAX liveblogging content for five or ten minutes and continuing to watch that page after it refreshes, doesn't your site deserve the CPM from that extra page view? In the absence of any other method to reward the extra stickiness and time-on-site that comes from AJAX content, the page refresh is the best way to ensure publishers get value for such high levels of engagement.

Right, with that out of the way, what do you liveblog? The simple answer is: any experience that people can share in that moment. Most usually, this will mean live events that people are aware of through other media, like television or the radio. Of course, you're not going to liveblog AFL because FanFooty's got that market covered ( :P ) but sports are an obvious target for what is called two-screen solutions. Perhaps more crucially, there is a massive opportunity to liveblog primetime TV shows. Back when Big Brother was in its hey day, Southern Star Endemol did an excellent job creating tie-in Web content to the show, but ever since then there has been not much at all to distinguish the local TV industry's online efforts. Q&A; integrates with Twitter somewhat by publishing highlights of tweets including the #qanda hashtag, but much more could be done along these lines, especially with highly structured shows. Game shows like Masterchef, Spicks & Specks and Good News Week are low hanging fruit waiting to be picked. Panel discussion shows such as The 7PM Project, Q&A; and Insight are ripe for liveblogging for those frustrated couch jockeys who want to participate in the debate. Even drama shows like Sea Patrol and Underbelly are suited for liveblogging, though you'd probably have to restrict that to local productions for fear of trolls spoiling the endings to shows that have already aired overseas.

Beyond TV-based liveblogging, there are some news events that demand their own liveblogging, which may include other media but are not reliant on it. Weather events like bushfires, earthquakes, heat waves and hailstorms are perfect for liveblogging, especially ones that happen out of the blue. Currently, there is no one Web site in Australia that people go to for instant information when something like that occurs, which to me speaks of a market opportunity for someone who can build a system that can react in real time to sudden news flashes like that. The history of news blogs on the Web is littered with publications who made their names on covering live events and garnered whole new swathes of new fans by providing information they weren't getting in old media. The key here is that the liveblogging screen must include all possible relevant information, linking where appropriate and keeping users on your own site where possible. Thus you can probably get away with hosting weather charts and alerts sourced from the BOM, but you won't be able to post live video of a prime ministerial resignation speech from Sky News or ABC News 24 - though a quickly typed transcription would be fantastic.

There are several points to make here about liveblogging. Twitter and Facebook integration can only take you so far. There is the right way to do it - Melbourne's own Duncan Riley managed to increase his page views per user on Inquisitr from something around 1.5 to 4 or 5 now after integrating Facebook commenting earlier this year - and there is the wrong way to do it, as in the AFL's integration of Twitter hashtag commenting in its live Flash app. The primary concern should be that all of your social media efforts should be geared to increasing visits and page views back at your own site. You're not in the business of growing Twitter or Facebook, you're leeching off their users. Don't be ashamed of that.

For users to want to come to your site to join in the chat, the mere fact of sharing the experience of whatever it is that you're liveblogging is not going to be enough to get traffic up to sustainable levels. You have to provide information that you won't get anywhere else, or at least not as easily. For FanFooty, the live stats are augmented by news snippets on each player written by me in real time as I watch games on TV or listen on radio, including injuries, matchups and form vignettes. For liveblogging a show like Masterchef, even though you wouldn't be an official partner with access to content before it airs, listing the ingredients of each dish as they are being prepared on screen would be a valuable resource. Online bios of guests on chat shows, abstracts of and links to news stories being discussed on panel shows, even thumbnail screenshots taken from live TV feeds of what the onscreen personalities are wearing... it's all up for inclusion in your liveblog as auxiliary content to add to the experience of watching or listening live.

In addition to your employees liveblogging all this content, they have to become experienced community managers, with particular emphasis on moderation of the chat on live blogs. Some liveblog subjects will appeal to a more mature crowd who will only require a soft touch, but I can tell you from my experiences moderating chats populated by rowdy teenage boys that a live chat on the Internet can get very willing if there is not a firm grasp by the publisher on what is and isn't allowed to be said. This does not necessarily mean having to approve every line of chat before it is submitted, as often happens in CoverItLive. Apart from anything else, this is unworkable when your site scales as you would hope that it would do. A simple swear filter and a frequent use of the ban stick is sufficient to set the tone of the chat, in my experience, and all but an easily squashed minority will follow the leader and act appropriately.

All of this content is well worth reusing to further drive up page views. Logs of your inhouse-sourced liveblogged material and edited highlights of the audience chat can be excellent traffic generators. Reaching out further to the Twitter and Facebook crowds can be very productive, such as republishing all of the #qanda zingers that didn't make it past the ABC censors to the live TV scroll.

Free content contribution is the core of the HuffPo model, but that doesn't mean that you have to source that content entirely through the old newspaper model of editors sifting through freelance submissions, as HuffPo still does. That technique is still useful for certain types of content, of course, but opening your site up to live, (somewhat) unfiltered participation from non-professionals who are enjoying themselves on your site is an invaluable way of generating both content and page views at the same time. In the Australian industry, hamstrung as it is by a small population and a tiny pool of skilled bloggers, I would argue it is mandatory to look outside the basic structure to make the business work in local conditions.

IT lizards feast on the filter fish

A number of technology media outlets in Australia have just finished running a poll on the mandatory Internet filtering issue, as the latest in a series of examples of what I would call "journalistic activism". The list of titles comprises the Sydney Morning Herald, News.com.au, APC, PC Authority, PC User, PC World, GoodGearGuide, Gizmodo, Life Hacker, Delimiter, Atomic, ITNews, ITWire, Metaversejournal, OCAU, Australian Sex Party and Kogan.com.au. Whirlpool and the CNET/ZDNet stable of sites ran their own polls with similar results. The main poll, run through PollDaddy, went as follows.

Would you vote for a political party that supports the internet filter?

Yes: 809 votes, 2%
No: 37,228 votes, 97%
Don't care: 390 votes, 1%

Total votes: 38,427

As a former tech journo (a.k.a. "lizard") myself, I am sceptical about the modern phenomenon of journalists putting aside their professional objectivity and actively campaigning against the filter, as with this poll and Gizmodo's Fight the Filter stunt. This is not because I am pro-filter, far from it. My political leanings are far to the left of the journo mainstream, and I am disgusted by the prospect of a filter.

I am old enough to remember at least two separate cycles of the mandatory Internet filtering issue through the federal houses, both of which eventually failed on technical grounds. My view is that it's a complete non-issue in the wider scheme of things, much like how boat people are only 2% of illegal immigrants yet they get 100% of the coverage. I have always trusted in the technology to fail time and time again. All the lobbying in the world is useless compared to the disapproval of people like Mike Malone and Simon Hackett, who have personally put the kibosh on this policy before and will do so again.

Thus, all this breathless wall-to-wall converage of utterances of whichever minister has been tasked with winning over right-wing minor parties in the Senate this time - Richard Alston courting Brian Harradine, Steven Conroy sucking up to Steve Fielding, et al - looks to me like so much hot air. Journos can make a name for themselves by yelling about the issue because it's an easy page view grabber, plus they gain instant brownie points with the strong libertarian faction in the IT audience. However, the more journos report on this issue, the more Alston/Conroy love it, as they can walk into Harradine/Fielding's office and point to Something Being Done about the conservative bugbear issue. After the government has squeezed as many Senate votes as possible out of their inexperienced patsy parliamentarian, the ISPs finally deliver a damning technical report and the minister can throw his hands up in mock shock and console the poor Senator about how it Just Wasn't Possible.

The whole thing is completely cynical, exploiting those who don't know their history and are doomed to repeat it. Sir Humphrey would be proud. It's the sort of issue that I would expect seasoned journos to see through very quickly, yet many continue to fight the good fight, in some cases taking up the bayonets themselves. If you, as a journo, want to treat opinion pieces as an opportunity to air your personal views, that's your right if the editor allows it, but I think that's a waste of the reader's time and should be kept to blogs or Twitter if aired at all. Opinion pieces are an opportunity to take a longer view, delve behind the bare facts that you report elsewhere, and try to identify bigger trends and deeper truths. Again, just my opinion.

The government is safe in the knowledge that the filter will never be a big election issue in the mainstream media, because political journos don't think IT issues are relevant to voters - with strong justification, IMO. Journos can blog until you're blue in the face on Giz or elsewhere but they would be lucky to hear a single question on the subject in the televised election debates. The only people who care enough about it to get passionate are two aspects of the far right: the religious fundamentalists and the libertarians. If the libertarians elected federal Senators with the balance of power I'm sure Conroy would be sucking up to them, but they don't so they can be ignored.

As has already been seen in the first days of the official election campaign, the economy and dog whistle issues dominate the debate. Those of us who have lived through enough elections to have seen it happen before can only groan at the cynicism of the entire fishing expedition.

Note: the above is a fixup of my contribution to a discussion on a private mailing list.

Cannibalise your bootstraps

I am planning to launch a version of FanFooty for the iPhone this week, after testing it in the weekend just gone. No, this is not just a puff piece for my site, I have actually got some mildly interesting thoughts to lay out, despite that rather boring first line.

I have always treated mobile Internet with the greatest of suspicion. Back when the Earth was young and dinosaurs roamed the fetid swamps of Elsternwick, I was a technology journalist during the first boom, and I heard chapter and verse about how the mobile Web was coming, just around the corner, wait and see. Very quickly, I developed an extremely jaundiced view over whether there was any future at all in mobile browsing, given how interminably sluggish the Australian industry is, and how shockingly backwards our competition environment is in telecoms. I remained right all the way through that first boom, and I had nothing to challenge my view until the advent of the iPhone.

Even the iPhone started relatively slowly in Australia, but 2010 is the year it has really taken off. iPhone ownership has jumped from 7% penetration to 15% in a year, I am told, and FanFooty's numbers show a similar jump from 5% to 15% year-on-year to April 2010 from the previous April.

I was talking on a forum somewhere last week about current threats to FanFooty, and the major one I could come up with in a standard SWOT analysis was the iPhone. It's a gamechanger. It also represents an opportunity for an application like FF, which is designed to be ultra-low bandwidth and maximum availability for high traffic spikes. One of the design criticisms of FF has always been that it looked "clunky" but my spartan aesthetic appears to work like a charm on the iPhone, where extraneous graphics, excessive page weight and long load times are a much bigger issue than on the mainstream of today's broadband-saturated Web.

Monetisation is my major issue. I have no experience with mobile advertising, so I am wary of committing to a new partner when my current one is going so well at the moment. Apparently AdMob, which has just been eaten by the Big G, is the main game so it would be an old partner I guess. My first inclination is to offer an ad-free version and charge users an annual fee directly through the iPhone App Store. I have already done the sums about how much money I make per user per year from advertising, and will adjust the iPhone app price to suit. That does lock out Nokia, Blackberry, Android and other mobile users though, which adds up to another 5% of the whole. I guess a separate ad-supported mobile version is the next step. Three versions of the one site, it's starting to get a bit unwieldy! Then there's the iPad coming over the hill...

Intertwined with this issue is exactly how mobile usage fits into the overall Web consumption habits of the average punter. Will mobile usage replace or complement desktop Web usage? Is it just the case that mobile will only replace desktop when users are out of the house, or will they work their thumbs over sitting on the couch fiddling with their JesusPhone even when a PC is in the next room? How does the iPad work into that dynamic, is its usage pattern more mobile-like or more PC-like, or something else entirely? How much does each of the three cannibalise usage of the other? These are all important questions to site operators like me, because - ironically - we now actually have to turf to defend, namely the "traditional" Web usage environment where publishers get more screen real estate to show more ads to the user. I can hear the newspaper owners' crocodile tears from here!

Last time I looked at the Web advertising industry in depth, the trend seemed to be with bigger display ad formats and shovelware TVCs in video pop-ups. I have benefited from the latter on FF, though I have refrained from the former as I think it's a sign of desperation from the agencies. Users are now flocking to mobiles where the opportunities for advertising are reduced in size and scope, which could be more than just a casual correlation if my gut feeling is right. I need to do some research into what the response by the publishing and advertising industries has been to the mobile explosion. How much revenue for content on the iPhone comes via app sales and how much via advertising and marketing? Is the iPhone a catalyst for a solid shift in monetisation away from advertising and towards user-pays models? Or is it another case of the whole being lesser than the sum of the parts in the older medium?

This is the world we are living in as of 2010. Apple has complicated the Web development environment just like the old browser wars, lengthening the dev cycle and calling into question the economics of the Web publishing industry. I would appreciate comments from people who are more experienced in this field than I, as it appears I have a lot of reading to do.

What gets me up in the morning?

I used my last post to look back on the first five years of FanFooty, and while it was cathartic to get the minutiae of history down all at once, there are a few more things I would like to say about my experiences.

I was asked on Twitter by Leslie Nassar about whether the first post was hard to write, and I had to admit that no, it wasn't. I am a feature writer from way back so my posts tend to be essay-length, and they tend to well up from my subconscious like so much molten lava, so that when they erupt it's more of a relief from pressure than a chore. Thus, I pondered afterward, I probably didn't give enough of myself in the telling. After five years there are bound to be things that are difficult to say, but should be said anyway.

I was asked a question the other day, by a fellow traveler down this long road of starting a startup. Why are we doing this? Why do we go on? Why do we get up in the morning? Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? Why?

The reason I have been giving in public when asked something like this has been that I wanted to test myself. I had been covering Internet startups during the first boom, meeting a lot of entrepreneurs, and I had the (hubricious) thought that I was just as good as these guys (or the rare girl), and I wanted to see if I could really hack it in this field. This caused me to join AusBONE, which ended up not being successful. I didn't have the sales skills at that time to really understand how to do cold calls, which was my primary role. Even if I had done much better, though, events overtook me and everyone else in the industry when the bubble burst and it didn't end up mattering.

Fast forward to 2004 and I finally got on the entrepreneur horse - for real this time as a founder, not just as an employee of someone else's startup. Part of it was desperation, as my other work prospects weren't appealing. The old desire to prove myself was still there. I have always been interested in expanding the boundaries of my skill set, as I am a firm believer in continuous education. It had been high school since I had last done any programming work, and PHP was easy enough for me to pick up without too much bridging work needed between my old BASIC knowledge.

That is the frontbrain explanation, which is usually all that is said in articles like this. Let me delve a little into the hindbrain. A large part of my motivation for doing what I do is anger. There, I said it. There are parts of my life that generate anger for me specifically, like the way I am treated by some people, or the deficiencies and weaknesses in my own character that continue to limit my potential. I am angry at certain individuals, and for some of them I know my anger is irrational, but that only increases the effect because I add anger at myself for being so damn childish. Sometimes the anger does turn in on itself, and I become unproductive. I'm not saying it's healthy in any way. However, when I can untangle the chains of anger and stop them whipping me, they can pull me with great strength in some sort of forward direction.

That is not to say that every entrepreneur is angry, or should act out of anger. Startup founders usually have strong egos or, if you don't like overtly Freudian language, a strong sense of self. To consider yourself worthy to be a founder in the first place usually means you have a diverse range of skills and a set of accomplishments you can look back on with pride, so the position self-selects for people who have credible confidence in themselves. I know some founders who act mostly out of love... for themselves, for their families (sometimes as an extension of themselves), for causes. Acting out of a positive affirmation of your own abilities is a perfectly healthy way for founders to operate. If you choose to label this as egotistical or narcissistic, that's your concern. Founders who can use their knowledge of their own mind to strengthen their resolve to act to benefit themselves have a better chance than most to succeed.

Getting down to work as a founder, when you don't have a boss sitting over your shoulder or a fortnightly paycheck that is on the line, sometimes requires using both of the above motivating factors. At other times, it feels to me like you have to actually ignore your own emotions. This is particularly true for those who hack code a lot, as losing yourself in thousands of lines of computer language is an intellectual exercise.

What gets me up in the morning? A sense of purpose. Sure, I don't have a partner or a family to support (or who support me). Would I like to be in that situation? Sure. Those in relationships can subsume their own personality into a gestalt entity, and gain strength from the whole. Plus, you know, chicks are soft and all. Nevertheless, I believe that is a separate thing from the distinctive emotional underpinning of why you continue to work at a start-up... as opposed to turning your brain off, donning a suit and taking a salary in a cubicle. Being a founder means that you have a strong sense of self, independent of familial roots, and part of your personality is tied up in being a founder. To deny that part of you, even if crazy shit is going on in other parts of your life, is to deny an essential part of yourself. No matter if you run on love, commitment, hope or anger, you must keep running, if for no one else's sake but your own. No one can survive on denial.

The Year My Startup Broke (in a good way)

December 2009 marked five years of operation for FanFooty, my Australian fantasy football site. I guess after five years you can't call it a start-up any more, it's just a business. Time is as good as any to look for backward and forward, now that I have reached what I consider to be a tipping point.

Back in December of 2004, my new housemate Tai Tran came to me and said that if I had an idea for a business to start, then he'd be interested in doing it together. Tai was about my age, had a professional background in corporate development, and was a likable bloke. He had the coding chops and I had the writing ability, and we both had proven track records in our fields. It seemed like a workable pairing.

I was introduced to the fantasy sports concept by some American friends of mine and got hooked. Looking around the Australian scene, I could see that it was sorely underdeveloped compared to the American and even the English industries. Even at that stage it was a billion-dollar business in the US involving 1 in 12 Americans, with ESPN, Yahoo, Sportsline.com and a host of others competing for big dollars; plus every major newspaper in the UK had a fantasy EPL game, with prizes well into six figure pound ranges. At the time here, there was only the AFL Dream Team competition with less than 50,000 players, and a handful of amateur efforts with virtually no patronage, but the upcoming year of 2005 was when DT numbers exploded to over 130,000 and the graph has been jumping every year since. It was the right time to start the business.

As with countless other startups in a myriad industries, our feeble plan as to what our business would look like and how it would make its money did not survive engagement with reality. My original thought was that the Australian industry had developed too far along English lines, focused around mass-entry salary cap competitions, and there was a perfect opportunity to expand into the American-style private draft leagues for small groups of 8-16 friends, and we would be at the forefront of it. The first thing we found was how difficult it was to build a private draft fantasy football application. I was learning PHP from scratch, not having had any programming education since high school (though I taught myself BASIC on my old Commodore 128D), but I had the business logic all in my head so it became rather time-consuming to explain how the application worked to Tai, who had no knowledge of or interest in sport, so that he could go away and write the code.

Nevertheless, we got the code done with Tai learning as much about AJAX techniques for the very tricky live drafting component as I did about PHP for the less difficult pages, and we had a workable application. Then came the dose of reality. We had very few customers. With no venture capital behind us to fund any sort of marketing budget, all I could do was hit the message boards to talk it up. That wasn't enough. That part of the business has been a waste of time, to put it bluntly. Five years later and no one, including VirtualSports as the official provider of its version called Premium Dream Team, has made much of a fist of the US-style private draft form of the game. The market opportunity still exists.

Back in FanFooty's debut AFL season of 2005, it didn't take me long to figure out a second possible revenue stream: live fantasy scoring. The official Dream Team site wasn't offering it at the time, but it seemed like a no-brainer for me as I was used to Sportsline and the other American fantasy providers who all provided live scoring. The feature was moderately popular in the first year, with site traffic reaching the dizzy heights of 20,000 page views in a couple of weeks and even swamping our meagre server resources by the start of May. In those first few months I created more and more pages from a combination of my own inspiration and feedback from users, setting up some of the fundamental features of the site which still drive traffic to this day. Even with Google AdSense, nevertheless, the revenue was barely covering the site hosting expenses.

It was 2006 - the first year of the Herald Sun Super Coach competition - when the site developed serious growing pains, and they hit very hard. At this stage we were still hosted on a shared server but we ended up shutting down the entire box for hours at a time during games on a weekend, due to a combination of a quadrupling of raw demand plus some loose code. It got bad enough that I decided I had to institute paid memberships to slow the torrent of users. That ended up being another big mistake. Barely 80 lots of $5/$10 later, I backed down. There was no other choice, Tai and I had to figure out how to build a more scaleable system or we wouldn't have a viable business. In the mean time, the site was developing an unwanted reputation for being unreachable on weekends and dropping connectivity at the drop of a hat, with "is fanfooty down?" an all too common refrain on the message boards. We were just too popular.

Thus it was that we started developing the techniques that have made FanFooty different to most other sites. It's not something that you can see - indeed, FanFooty's design aesthetic is rather minimalist, even old-fashioned in some respects. Over time, we did some benchmarks and watched the health or otherwise of the live scoring section of the site under different traffic conditions. We eventually decided to abandon the LAMP stack entirely. Our new architecture involved a second server running lighttpd instead of Apache, with no database or scripting languages installed. This allowed maximum scalability for a small subset of pages that was driving the vast majority of our page views. Purist pro programmer friends scoffed at the client-heavy AJAX scripting, but it worked for us with our limited server resource budget.

By this stage Tai and I were both gaining confidence in our abilities, and were enjoying the learning process of discovering new bits of code to use as weapons in the neverending war against our own ignorance. That's not to say that all was clean sailing. I got very angry at times during server downtimes, and I am ashamed to say that I took some of it out on poor Tai. For his part, Tai did some very good work but I was the one providing just about all of the creativity on the project, which caused further tensions. In addition, my sleeping schedule was occasionally moving around the clock, so that for weeks at a time our waking times weren't intersecting all that often.

Nevertheless, 2007 was a good year on many fronts. I was a big fan of the Hitwise model of startups, insomuch as you have a cash cow business and a home run business operating side by side: the former funding the latter, and the latter eventually being the one that takes you over the top. For our purposes, FanFooty was the cash cow and Tinfinger was the home run. Much of 2007 was spent in developing Tinfinger, a "human omnibus" with elements of Wikipedia, TechMeme and Squidoo/Mahalo, plus a social networking app bolted on the side. FanFooty grew in traffic by 640% year-on-year, so it was by no means being neglected, and many more important features were created this year, including the FanFooty blog and the Coaches Box podcast. Tinfinger was where most of our energy was directed, and it was here that the cracks in the partnership between myself and Tai finally opened up. Tai has many fine qualities, but he doesn't possess the spark of originality of thought that I was looking for as part of a good founder's skill set. That's not to say that a founder necessarily needs to be particularly original to create a successful business. I, however, needed someone who was prepared to invest a little more brainpower and take the pressure off me to formulate every little bit of our strategy.

I don't mean to denigrate Tai by saying the above, either, so let me talk a bit about how good it was to have him as a co-founder, and how invaluable he was at the darkest times. There were periods where I needed a friend more than I needed a business partner, and he was there to listen to me as I sloooowly opened up. Similarly for him, he went through some terrible personal stuff around that time and (I hope) I was able to contribute in some small way to his recovery. Often our mood swings would complement each other so that one would be able to share his energy to encourage the other when they were down.

2007 was also a good year for advertising, and with growth to above half a million page impressions per week, advertisers were starting to take notice. Through AdSense we started getting targeted campaigns from major advertisers like Pepsi, Schick and Gillette, which added up to our first year of profit, albeit still nowhere near enough to pay both of us living expenses.

2008 was quite the opposite. Tinfinger launched in January and, unlike FanFooty, we couldn't rely on the large amount of pent-up demand that greeted us back in early 05. The ego-arbitrage space was already well populated by companies larger, smarter and more experienced than us. The division of labour between myself and Tai became more pronounced, as my programming skills rivalled and in some areas surpassed his. After a fair few shouting matches and other unpleasantness, I knocked it on the head in May and negotiated an agreement whereby he would continue to be paid a percentage of FanFooty profits but we would drop Tinfinger. The split wasn't what either of us wanted, which indicated that it was fair at the least.

In addition, we had made another big mistake that year in changing advertising providers, going from AdSense to local firm 3dinteractive (part of ASX-listed Q Ltd). I don't wish to disparage 3di either, suffice it to say that nothing good whatsoever came out of that relationship. Our traffic doubled off a very healthy base, going from half a million to one million page views per week, but we had very little to show for it at the end of the season, having earned precisely zero dollars out of the April-through-July period (for reasons I won't go into). By the time we got back onto AdSense the major advertisers' campaigns had deserted us, and we were lucky to break even across the year.

The start of 2009 looked like being even more disastrous as the AdSense numbers fell into the toilet in January as the GFC hit, but two fortunate events occurred. First, we were headhunted by Platform 9, an ad agency division of ninemsn whose primary focus is on video ads, but also operates a system much like AdSense for remnant display inventory for Australian advertisers. Their numbers took a little while to come on but they have been very pleasing, with the video element providing an invaluable auxiliary revenue stream. Second, we were rather lucky to get our first direct sponsorship deal, with Betfair. Every major football media property aligned itself with one of the betting providers in 2009 after the relaxation of legislation which previously preventing them from advertising. The combination of these two events made 2009 a much more comfortable year in terms of revenue, especially since traffic doubled yet again to average two million page impressions per week.

By this time Tai was doing virtually no work on FanFooty, as per our agreement, but this had been the case for two or three years previous anyway. However, he came to me late in the season to talk about dissolving our previous agreement and freeing both of us up for the future. For this, I can only thank Tai for his maturity and understanding. He has a lovely girl who makes a great partner for him now, and he is over most of the problems that beset him during the worst of our times at the Geelong house, some of which were due to our business.

I have since moved to Brunswick and have settled down into a new lifestyle. I can look forward to a future where I have complete control over all aspects of my life and business, and Tai can do the same with the projects he has in development. I don't agree with those people who look back on a five-year span like this and say something like, "I wouldn't have done anything differently." That's silly. Of course I made mistakes, and I hurt people, and I let people down at times, not least of all myself. I would like to have avoided the decisions I made that wasted some of the precious and limited time I have on this earth to make something of myself.

Nevertheless, I can't change anything now, and I can at least live with what has happened. Not that many people ask me for advice, but if they did, I would tell them to get themselves a time machine, go back five years and start a business. It takes five years to get to the point where you know what you're doing and where you're going.

I am happy to have survived that process, where many of my contemporaries have not. I started at around the same time as the likes of Cameron Reilly, Bronwen Clune, Ben Barren and Duncan Riley, all of whom I like greatly and admire for their best qualities. All but Ben were married when they started, and now none of them are. None of them are still working the same startup as when they started. Web 2.0 has been and gone, and it has left many of my friends with not much at all to show for it despite years of hard yakka.

At this point my old technology journalist mates from my previous life might snigger behind their hands, but most of the jobs that they were in five or ten years ago have disappeared too, into the ether or perhaps only half-replaced by itinerant freelance table scraps. Worthy efforts like Hydrapinion and iTWire are not introducing new journos into the industry from what I can see, and aren't ambitious enough to start generating new jobs.

From the above, some of you might think I have been exceedingly lucky to even get this far, despite the business still not earning enough to give me a decent wage. That is probably true. I have put a lot of hard work into FanFooty over the years, though, and I think I deserve it. I have only survived in part because I am not married or even in a relationship. Only now do I feel it would be fair to subject a girl to my lifestyle. Most would still look down their nose at my lack of financial stability. On that front, things are looking a little more lively in 2010 than at any recent time, so there's a lot to look forward to.

I realise this blog post got a bit long and rambling, so for that I apologise. I might follow up with some further thoughts later in the week. Thanks for reading this far, I'm off to the parents' place for a weekly roast dinner. Some things never change. :)

Poor old Johnny Hartigan begin again

Via the Inquisitr and Andrew Bolt's blog comes the transcript of local News Corp boos John Hartigan's Canutian address to the endless waves of the blogosphere crashing over his sandcastle business.

As Duncan points out in the Inq piece, it's now a tired old cliche for journalists to attack the blogosphere for being unprofessional, as if that's the cause of the problem, when the actual issue is the gutting of advertising revenues from the classified rivers of gold. I almost fell asleep writing that, it's such a hoary chestnut of an argument. So old that journos fall into it like a pair of old slippers.

Hartigan is running the new Murdoch line of browbeating the public into paying for journalism, which goes against centuries of tradition.

I believe people will pay for content if it is:
- Original...
- Exclusive...
- Has the authority
- and is relevant to our audiences

Let's look at these four criteria, especially in the context of successful paywall-funded local online enterprises such as Crikey and the various share trading newsletters. Originality is a given, no arguments there. Exclusivity of content is not so important, in my view. In some ways, putting a paywall around content makes it inherently exclusive of those who don't pay. Does a Crikey or a Marcus Padley need to have scoops from a Hillary Bray insider type to sell subscriptions? Not necessarily, though it helps to build the brand. Authority is also overblown, I think. To me, that word is redolent of an elite class sermonising to faithful devotees, a model that just doesn't work in a media environment where the hoi polloi have as much publishing power online as do the journalists. If you set yourself up as the authority on something, how do you deal with a reader who corrects you in the comments on a story? You're just setting yourself up for a fall. A more successful approach is to collaborate with the readership to get the story right, to be accessible. Finally, the word "relevant" also smacks to me of a lack of connection with the audience. Why not use language that indicates you are listening to your readers directly, instead of paying consultants to find out for you?

Hartigan makes a big song and dance about the integration of digital and print functions in the newsroom. I don't know how truthful that is, but it can't be worse than the poisonous atmosphere between Fairfax Digital and the rump of the old guard at their paper premises. News must look like sweetness and light in comparison.

Hartigan goes on later in the speech to list what News is going to do online to halt the rot:

tools that allow you to conduct transactions with our advertisers

The old parish pump reporting on local news will be reinvented as hyperlocal coverage of real time events such as
- Where to find the cheapest petrol
- How to avoid roadworks and traffic jams and
- The best retail offers available in your suburb that day

I see coverage of politics, courts and crime changing dramatically - with less of the adversarial conflict we report now to coverage that gives readers more insight about the issues.

I see changes in the news mix – less of the negative stuff and more content that inspires, surprises and delights readers, more humour, more escapism.

- give them what they need to make decisions
- and equip them to act on those decisions

Very little of this describes actual journalism. As with much of a typical newspaper already these days, it's just public relations and marketing dressed in journalism's still-bloodied hide. The last snippet in particular screams out to me that News is determined to build a new river of gold - or at least pewter - out of cost-per-action and/or affiliate "content", so that instead of relying on classifieds for steady cashflow they will build their revenue streams on the likes of Ben Barren-built truelocal.com.au, which isn't journalism at all. The line between editorial and advertising in such brochureware is shaky at best in print but is functionally non-existent in an online context.

For the last decade or two, newspapers have been stealing shamelessly from the formats of periodical magazines, particularly "lifestyle" mags. Not coincidentally, many of the mags that the News tabloids are aping are owned by ACP, continuing on the battles in days of yore between Murdoch and Packer media properties long past Kerry's death.

It appears to me from the last section of that speech, despite Hartigan's early bluster, that the News Ltd approach is going to continue to be to leave the majority of the serious journalism to the broadsheets, radio and ABC/SBS, with The Australian used less as an instrument of democratic journalistic principles and more of an attack dog to support the editorial staff's rabid political leanings. The Herald-Sun and Daily Telegraph are going to look more and more like bits of ACP magazines stitched together. The front and back pages are going to get more and more shrill in their shouting for eyeballs.