Topic: BitCoinTorrentz.com - Torrent Download Service - page 29. (Read 57198 times)

The shares do come with a vote, as stated in the contract, but since I only released 20% of them so far, I still maintain executive control. I am however 100% open to any and all suggestions, from both shareholders and the community at large. I greatly value any input received, and this thread alone has already helped me make several excellent modifications to the site.

With regards to your questions. Yes, I do intend to fully publish numbers. But I am not sure where the best place to do this would be. Here in this thread? On the website itself? Through a transparent stats page open to the public or perhaps only open to shareholders? In a group email to shareholders? I am not sure.

The service has been operational for a bit over a week now, and has generated 2.6961 btc in earnings. My prediction for the first 3 weeks was only 2.1 btc, so we are already exceeding the targets outlined in my business plan by almost 400%.

When I get the news section up and running, I will most likely use that for earnings reports etc. On my to-do list also is the improvement of the referral control panel, to give you details like conversion rate, earnings per click, etc.

And yes, I am completely willing to discuss the pricing. I know what you mean about visitors having to be in the right mood at the right time. I do feel that the price is probably a little high, and bandwidth is easy to come by while bitcoins are not. So to give incentive to use the service, I have a few ideas that I'm juggling around in my head:

• Start a promotional offer that gives users 50% off downloads under 1gb. This would run for a couple of weeks until a solid user base has been built up.
• Change the price structure from a static 0.1btc/gb to a sliding scale, reducing the cost for larger torrents.
• Link the price to a weighted average of btc:usd value, as described above.
• Give affiliates the ability to issue promotional codes that entitle the user to 1 free download, or else randomly issue them to visitors of the site, which would encourage return traffic

What do you think?

I'm a happy shareholder. I know the shares come with no vote and everything is up to you (and I trust you, otherwise I wouldn't have bought the shares)
Let me ask some questions, however, that might trigger some discussion:

• Are you going to publish some numbers, like number of downloads, revenue from downloads, hits through referrall program, hits without referrer, conversion rate, etc...? If so, will you do so regularly and when?
• Are you open to discuss the pricing? I would opt for a lower price, at least at the beginning. My referral stats page says I brought 38 hits that converted to 0 downloads... maybe the price is too high, maybe it'll just need time to "incubate", but back when I was "only" a user, I thought the price was a bit high, and I really had to be in the situation to "be looking for exactly that service" in order to use it. Maybe this is a situation where more money can be earned at a lower price-point, at least until the server capacity is reached?

You seem really motivated and productive, keep it up

Usenet is one of the oldest network systems in use. The protocol has been around since the 70's. It was probably one of the first decentralized systems, and paved the road towards the development of the bit torrent protocol. It was never designed for the purposes of filesharing, it was a communications network. Bulletin boards and email superseded it for that purpose, just like protocols like bittorrent have superseded its filesharing use.

Today, usenet is outmoded and antiquated for the purposes of p2p sharing. It's not useless, not by any means, but you have to pay subscription fees, then learn its many idiosyncrasies and use command-line instructions. It's not for everyone, and has primarily a devout cult following. It's not well understood, and to be honest, there are better alternatives available now. Also, I could be wrong, but I believe many ISP's actually block usenet traffic from their networks. Please correct me if I am mistaken there.

But anyway, there is nothing you can get on usenet that is not available on torrent trackers.


Awesome!! Thanks for taking the time to do that. The more publicity bitcointorrentz can get, the better! Just one point of note however, I will issue dividends every two months, not monthly, as stated in your writeup. I did state initially that it would be a monthly payment, but I subsequently decided that a bi-monthly payment structure would be better and edited my post above to reflect this. Sorry for the confusion.

My current list of to-do items:
1. Create a unique wallet address based payment system
2. Improve the banners and the referral control panel.
3. Implement support for magnet links (as suggested by HostFat)
4. Add a news/blog page (also suggested by HostFat)
5. Link the pricing structure of the service to a moving average of the btc:usd rate

Any other suggestions?

Posted about your site on my trading info site.

http://btcstocktrader.com/

Haha. Nice catch! Thanks.

@marks1976: Yeah, sure, no problem mate. Go ahead and use those banners. I would ask that you use the direct link to them from my server however, so if I change them in the future, they will be updated, and you won't have to re-download and re-upload them again. They are rough and ready right now, and I hope to get some more visually appealing banners put together very soon.

@molecular: if you check my sig, the banner that I am using there is a little bit smaller, but I have aligned "torrentz.com" in the way you suggested. I am pretty obsessive. Not sure how that first banner draft escaped my attention. Thanks for the additional suggestions regarding the banners. I will take it all on board.

And yeah, it's absolutely amazing. Two days ago I was just the creator of another bitcoin site, and today I am the CEO of a publicly traded company! Things certainly do move quickly in the bitcoin world! I absolutely love the idea of GLBSE too. Those guys are going to play a key role in the bitcoin economy in the future.

Homepage:

Donations Weclome



Can you also add support for magnet links?

You could also add a news page, or a twitter widget ... so people will be able to get news from you even if the service goes offline. ( you can also add a link to this dicussion ... )
I can't see a link to the GLBSE thing on your pages, people should know about it ... even if they don't know anything about this forum

I don't think that's a good idea. The banners should be used by linking to whereever site auhtor puts them, imho, so they can be changed by him later. No?

I'm not a graphics designer either. I like the banners, but let me make suggestions:


I suggest scaling "TORRENTZ.COM" to the left until the "T" touches the imaginary line of the left side of the "b" above it.


I'm not sure I would use the bitcoin logo as letter "B". Would leave the logo right there, but prepend "B" to "itcointorrentz.com". I know it's used like that on the site (which I like the style of, btw)

"Remote Torrent Download Service": maybe you can use one of the 2 fonts already used? 3 fonts in one banner is quite a lot. Also maybe italicize it, so it doesn't "fight" the "bitcointorrentz.com" above it?

Just my 2 cents, because I'm invested in the company

----

On another note: Isn't this awesome, we have a working stock exchange. And bitcoin makes everything so liquid. One day bitcointorrenz service goes online, next day the company goes public, issuing shares. Less than a day later the public stock is all bought, 40 BTC capital raised. Couple hours later stock is actively being traded. Isn't this just amazing? How long does such a process take in the "old world"?

LOL

No pun intended? ;0)

I could do that but I didn't create it so I thought it was best to ask.

Cant you just copy the banner to your computer and upload it?

So what's the benefit of using this service over just paying for Usenet?

I do like the idea as far as it getting people to spend bitcoins, but I suppose if you've ever used Usenet, you'd never look back   That said, there are a lot of people out there who aren't savvy enough to move to usenet (or who truly don't want to pay for it, but then those people are out of your target market as well) and are stuck in the old torrent ways, so I suppose you're after those types.

I am a shareholder.  Do you think it would be possible to share one of your banners, because helping you is helping me.

Yeah, I'm working on the banner thing, but I'm not a graphic designer. So for, I've got:



and



  They need a bit of work...

Ive heard the guys at http://lmptfy.com like your idea too.   

Your referral program needs some banners. 

Wow awesome that was fast.

Wow... all 200 shares have now been bought, in less than 24 hours! Thank you to everyone who has invested.
Dividends will be paid every 2 months, on the 16th of the month - the date the company was listed on GLBSE.

With this initial capital injection, I intend to market this service intensively. I will also consider obtaining an even faster, gigabit server, which would increase torrent download speeds by a factor of 10. I will wait until the current one has exceeded it's capacity however.

I will keep this thread updated with any news related to this service.

Just an update on my GLBSE listing. Of the 200 original shares I have offered, 102 have already been purchased. There are still 98 available shares remaining at a price of 0.2btc. The reception has been more significant than I had expected.

Here is a link to the BitCoinTorrentz ticker chart on GLBSE:
http://charts.glbse.com/markets/BitCoinTorrentz.html

Sorry about that, it was a typo in the contract. I have rectified the error in the server filename to reflect the contract.

With regards to my business plan, I'm the first to admit that im not an economist by any means, I am a scientist. But I have done some growth projections and calculated an estimate of total earnings of approximately 250 btc within 12 months. This estimate is based on a conservative growth model of +1 downloads/day/fortnight (downloads per day per fortnight) and a 0.5gb average filesize. Or in other words, an increase of 1 download per day, each fortnight. I think this is a very achievable target, with some expenditure on marketing. Continuing this model into the following 12 months, I predict total earnings in year 2 to be on the order of 700 BTC.

My expenses right now are primarily advertising and marketing of the service to potential new users, referral commissions, and server rental. The total cost of server rental per annum is approximately $1000, but this cost is split between myself and a colleague who uses it for his own, low resource intensive, website interests. This leaves a total server rental costs at approximately $500 per annum (or approximately 100 btc per annum at CURRENT rates).


The cost of the service WILL be modified as the price of bitcoin falls or rises. I have thought hard about this, and ideologically, I would prefer not to do that, but considering expenses must be paid, I am working on a way to automatically set the fee based on a weighted average of the btc/usd price. This is one of many future updates I have in mind.

The money raised from the sale of these shares will be invested in advertising and marketing to the bitcoin-spending community. I am in the process of creating a google adwords campaign to deliver targeted traffic for some related keywords. I am also advertising on dailybitcoins.org, and intend also to list it on operation fabulous. The remains of any proceeds will be used for whatever other capital investments in the site that I see necessary.

Very interesting service.

I will be watching this thread closely before deciding on whether to invest or not.