The Spoony Experiment is a collection of movie and game reviews mixed with video blogs. For the most part, watching his videos is like talking to a nerdy friend about movies and video games. The videos are well made, with great production value, and can be hilarious. Some of the reviews are done incredibly creatively, and some are just Spoony sitting in front of a camera talking about a movie that he just saw. Every once in a while he will include his brother, which adds a nice change, and he should do more often. The biggest problem I have content wise is that there is a lack of regular updates, leaving me to completely forget about the site from time to time.
The Delivery:
The website is simple enough, and appears to be running in Word Press. The template is kind of bland, and seems outdated. There are some ads around, one of which always seems to feature a distractingly busty women, but the ad system he uses allows anyone to purchase ad space on his site a month or so at a time, so the ads won’t change too much. There is a menu across the top of each page, with one menu for game reviews, one for movie and TV reviews, and a complete video list that contains content from the other two menu items as well as video logs. On the right of each page there is a content bar, but it is a little convoluted, and it all seems to run together. There is an RSS icon on the side of the screen, but it doesn’t pop out as it is surrounded by other icons.
The video hosting service he uses plays ads before each video, which is smart, but can be annoying if you can only watch half the video in one sitting and the rest later. Below each video there is a share menu, which could be replaced with a simple Facebook like that people can click on without even thinking about it. There is a small description of each video, but the text can have little to nothing to do with the actual video. Each video has a comment section, where you have to login using Facebook twitter etc. to post a comment.
The website features a message board, but it has a different look and feel than the rest of the site. You also have to register to just view the message board, and it uses a separate login system then the comment sections, and you can’t just login with your Facebook account like most new message boards. Once you get into the message board, there is a fairly vibrant community, and it seems like people post several times per hour.
What I would change:
Having a theme that is a little more focused would make it easier to market the site. Marketing the site as say the nerd ambassador: the guy that welcomes new nerds into the nerdy folds, would easily tie all of his content together and make it easy to find a target market.
Longer descriptions under the videos would get Google to like the site a little better. This could include some deep links to related videos within the site, which would also increase search indexing. He should try to get fan sites for things that he is talking about to link to his videos with a quality description surrounding it. Also making it as easy as possible for fans to share videos on Facebook and twitter would add some hits, and it would also expand the channel for delivering new content.
As far as making money goes the name of the game here is CPM, meaning the more viewers the better. I’m sure that the site has a great deal of regular users, but not as many as he could have. If there where regular updates, more than once a week, it would be easier to get people into the habit of returning to the site. I know that he has the Wrestle! Wrestle! Site, and updates it frequently, but that caters to a much smaller market with just as much competition. Content as simple as talking about random episodes of TV shows, things in the news, or whatever. Also some of the videos could also come with an .mp3 file, so people could listen to it on the go. It would also give Spoony a presence in places like the iTunes store, or even give the site its own mobile app where people could stream the audio. This could open him up to new revenue streams from audio advertisements.
The site should also use amazon associates, where he could post a link to the amazon page of the product that he is talking about. He could also create an “astore” where he could suggest other nerdy content for people to check out.
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