I started a site called 9rules.com, along with a few other folks, around 2005. It was an aggregator of content from a curated list of blogs that people submitted to us a few times per year. Every 6 months or so we'd hold a "membership round" starting at midnight and literally thousands of blogs would submit their URL to us with the hopes of becoming a "9rules Member" and have their content syndicated on 9rules.com. We had a long list of criteria and painstakingly went through each blog to see if it met our standards of quality.

I wouldn't say it was a failure (it led to numerous other opportunities and friendships and we eventually had a small exit) but it was certainly not the success that we had all envisioned.

You can visit http://9rules.com now and see how the site is set up. It's been the same since before the acquisition.

Here are some facts about 9rules:

- 90% of our site visitors were newcomers. The vast majority of those were coming from Google. At one point we had a 9 PageRank (then it dropped due to stupidity on our part) so we were ahead of all the blogs we syndicated on Google.

- We were great at driving traffic from 9rules.com to our members. Not Digg-like (the measuring stick of the time) but more sustained traffic. And a ton of these visitors subscribed to the member's RSS feed.

What were the problems?

- The typical website visitor accessed 9rules, found a blog (or a few blogs) that they liked, visited that site, subscribed to their RSS, and then never came back to 9rules. Traffic never took off because it was continuously leaving and turning over. I guess we were too good at highlighting our members, but hey, that was the point of the site as we envisioned it.

- We had a pretty well-known brand, but had far less traffic than people thought we had. I sold ads for us for awhile and we couldn't do CPM-based pricing because our traffic was just too low for it to be effective. We had to hand-pick our advertisers and do special adver-torial advertising campaigns each time that were more of a brand buy than a traffic buy. Custom design and lots of work for each one since they were all totally different with different executions. This never scaled.

- We were too ahead of the curve, or something. We had a "lifestream" feature before anyone else really had that (integrating 5+ social services into one page sorted by time). We also had a question & answer section where each one could be starred, upvoted, or downvoted, back in 2007 or so. These features were awesome to develop but they were too early in the lifecycle of social network adoption to really take off.

- Couldn't get traffic to stick to our site. I mentioned this before, but if you're trying to build up traffic you need people to STAY at your site and keep coming back. We developed new thing after new thing to keep them there but it really never kept the traffic like we had hoped.

Lessons learned:

- Building something cool that a lot of people love doesn't mean you'll get rich off it. We had 9rules members tattoo the 9rules leaf logo into their arm. People had parties in Malaysia when we had a new membership round. A wife of a member made us all 9rules leaf pillows (it's on my desk in front of me). People thought we were millionaires based on our brand presence but we weren't. Not even close.

- If you're not motivated by money when you first build your thing then it'll be hard as hell to make any money. We built 9rules because it was a cool idea we had. We envisioned this great site with all these great features. We didn't think too much about a business model beyond ads.

- The relationships we made while running 9rules are priceless. Almost every good thing that's happened to my career since 2005 I can attribute directly to 9rules or recognition that 9rules brought me.

- Selling ads to put food on your table fucking sucks when your traffic isn't booming. You have to be scrappy and determined, and if you're both those things, you're still behind the 8 ball because you can't get on the major ad networks unless you have 5M+ pageviews per month.