Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

- Vince Lombardi -                     

At times over the past few weeks ActiveRain has been slow and even sometimes unresponsive.  I want everyone to know that we know about the problems and take them very seriously. Our members invest themselves to create content with the hopes that it will eventually reach their customers or other industry professionals. It is our calling and responsibility to ensure that we maintain the platform so that when your customers and colleagues try to find you, they can.

We are very dedicated to fixing our site stability problems and have invested significant resources towards this goal. The root cause of the problem has been the significant consumer traffic increases that we have been experiencing on a month over month basis; we are now seeing over 1.5 million visits to ActiveRain each month! We initially built this community on a shoestring budget so at times during our initial growth we had to take shortcuts just to make things work.  We are paying for those shortcuts now, but the good news is that we now have the funding to build the infrastructure correctly, and we have made significant progress on that front over the past 5 months.  

I see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Below is a list of our current initiatives. They make up what we believe to be the final tasks to bringing ActiveRain to the robust professional level where it needs to be:

1. We are in the process of upgrading the hardware on all of our
servers, which should substantially improve performance.  At the same
time we are also doubling the number of web servers.

2. We've contracted with another firm to provide 24 hour a day
maintenance and support for our systems.  They will be able to react
to any issues that come up much faster, and will also be working with
us to make sure the system as a whole is stable.

3. We've moved some of our development resources from new projects to
fixing a few issues that have been identified.

My heartfelt thanks go to all of you for engaging your peers and your clients through ActiveRain. The near future holds some great opportunities and with your involvement we will move the real estate world forward. 

I used to get asked all the time, "How is ActiveRain going to make money?".  However, since the HouseValues investment things have slightly changed; now everyone is eager to tell me how ActiveRain is going to make money. 

The funny thing is that most people's understanding of ActiveRain's value proposition is wrong. Most people tell me that the value of ActiveRain is in our member's content. That is false. Although the content on ActiveRain is valuable to it's members, I do not view it as a primary value to ActiveRain Corp. At least in the sense that none of our planned revenue models are dependent on utilizing our members content to make money.

Seth Godin published a post today that explains ActiveRain's business strategy perfectly, so I am going to leave you with a portion of his post instead of trying to paraphrase what he said.

"...the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build isn't an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about...

When we first set out to create ActiveRain, we wanted to bring the real estate industry together in a way that never existed before – a way that many thought impossible. What we imagined but never expected was the impact a community like this would have on its members. 

Since our launch in June of 2006, we have been marked by two extraordinary achievements: our exponential growth and how we accomplished it without any institutional funding. We never budged from our pledge of free membership -- which now extends to over 65,000 real estate professionals. And we’ve steadfastly maintained open access to useful real estate information to the more than 10,000,000 visitors to our network of sites.

I am proud of what ActiveRain has accomplished so far, but there’s more to do. There is more you have asked us to do. To accomplish this we needed financial resources. Which brings us to a special announcement I want to share with you. ActiveRain has accepted a minority capital investment from HouseValues designed to help us grow and become more of what we had always hoped we could be.
 
A great deal of thought and consideration went into this decision. I’d like to share some of that with you.   
 
2007 taught us a few things. The biggest perhaps is how prudent we need to be about who we do business with. Despite the many hands held out to us over the past few months, the right one had to gain a firm grip on our trust. HouseValues did that – above all others.

Financial terms were important to us, but throughout the entire process we continually asked ourselves "who understands us and our culture the best?” and “Who will help us keep our commitments to the community? HouseValues, a local company with a wealth of experience in our industry, hit the mark.

Daniel Burnham, the visionary architect from Chicago, once said, "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized."

We never set out with little plans and we are going forward with big ones.  The future of this community – and this business -- rests on three pillars: ActiveRain (our professional network), Localism (our consumer destination), and our soon-to-be-released Outside Blogging platform. These things stir our blood. We hope they will stir yours.

We can barely contain our excitement over the promise that this year offers. Our community has a new member and they are committed to seeing it stay exactly as it is and becoming exactly what it desires. 

You hear it all the time, "ActiveRain really doesn't have a lot of consumer traffic.".  Well at least I hear it all the time. Usually I don't offer too much of a rebuttal, I just shrug and offer a little crooked smirk. However, in celebration of hitting over 1 Million visits to the ActiveRain.com domain name for the first time last month, I think it is time to write a short post and set the record straight.

Although I can't definitely state exactly how many of those 1 million + visits were non real estate professionals, I believe I can deduct a pretty good estimate.

1. Search engine visitors are generally first time visitors to AR and represent mostly consumers.

The graph to the right shows that over 75% of the traffic on AR originated from search engines.

2. The most used search engine keywords to find AR are: real, estate, in, for, county, of, home, sale, to, homes, mortgage, realty, florida, house, new 

To me those look like words consumers would use in searching for real estate related information.   

Of course everyone is free to make their own conclusions, but I would bet that over 1/2 a million non-real estate professionals visited AR last month. 

As many have noticed, we removed the ability for our members to rank posts based on a 1-5 score. We decided to do this for three reasons.

1. Very few members used it.
   
2. Not effective due to lack of use.
   
3. Confusing. (is 1 best, or is 5 best)

Instead of a 5 point scoring system, we are moving to a one point scoring system.  Press the "Share" button, and that's a "1"... don't press it, and it's a "0".

The "Share" button does the following:

1. Give's the post a "thumbs up" rating.
2. Saves the post to your <publicly viewable> "shared folder".
3. Adds your name to the list of people who give the post a "thumbs up".  Others can access this list via a link on the post itself.
   

Please note that we are working on refreshing the look of AR as a whole and this new "shared" rating system is a part of the overall site redesign.  We are expecting the site redesign to be complete by the end of November. The new shared rating system will be launched at the same time as the site redesign goes live.

I read a comment left by Missy Caulk yesterday that has had a profound impact on me. 

"I kept having dreams ( seriously ) about AR selling to Homegain. Now anything with r dot com, et all.....is a nightmare !"

AR has always been significant and deeply meaningful to me, as it is the culmination of much of my life's work (and likewise for Matt). I knew (and have greatly hoped) people like AR, I just didn't grasp until more recently how significant it is to them.

Back in April we drafted a blog post titled, "ActiveRain’s Weltanschauung".  The philosophies in this "living" document are things that ActiveRain members can count on.  We took the creation of this document very seriously.  It was created to act somewhat like a bill of rights, for our members. 

As long as the ActiveRain community is alive and vibrant these philosophies will be honored.  That is not something that we are willing to compromise on. Our members are the core of our existence, the guiding light by which our decisions are made. We deeply respect that relationship.

Please read through the Weltanschauung again, if you haven't already had a chance to do so. I would really appreciate it if you would let me know what you think about it. 

-Jonathan Washburn
ActiveRain

P.S.  Having a full fledged membership in ActiveRain is free.  That isn't going to change.  

"The award for Most Innovative Media Site went to ActiveRain Real Estate Network, the largest online social networking site for real estate practitioners. Launched a little over a year ago, ActiveRain had grown its membership to more than 30,000 individuals working in the real estate industry. The site represents a new era of real estate media in which more and more participants create the content and conversations being published online."

Link to full article - Password protected after today

WAHOO!!!  :) 

ActiveRain is a vital and growing network.  Since inception we have grown by an average of 5% per week and it doesn't look like the growth is slowing down! We believe the more traffic we can drive to ActiveRain the more business our members will generate from the site.

The second graph down represents traffic sent by each of the search engines. February's numbers represent only through today (Feb 26th).

Late next week we are working towards a beta launch of an exciting new ActiveRain product. It will be our first attempt at making money and we would like to work with 10-12 Rainers to help us design and test this product.  We are looking for a cross section of our users; new members and long time members, young and old, very active and not so much, high and low tech.  You get the idea.

If you would like to be a part of this group please leave a comment on this post.  The focus group will likely involve one conference call early next week with Matt, Ben, James, and myself. 

In case anyone is wondering, the new product will allow ActiveRain members the ability to host their ActiveRain blog on their own private domain name. Their blog will be customizable and the comments will syndicate back and forth between ActiveRain and your own personal blog.