Tip’d Turns 2.0!

Hey everyone! Boy, does time fly! It was only a little while ago that we announced that Tip’d had come out of beta and turned 1.0. Four months later we’re already marching into our next big release: Tip’d 2.0. In the intervening months we’ve hit several more milestones in terms of inbound and outbound traffic, user registration growth, and activity on the site in terms of daily submissions, votes, and comments. Furthermore, we have a slew of bug fixes and new features to announce today; so let’s get to it.

Let’s Grow Together

As the economy worsens and a larger percentage of people turn to the Web to seek financial news and advice, we’ve seen our monthly traffic double from 100,000 page views to 200,000 page views, and are sending 100–300 referral visits from a ‘published’ (front-paged) story to linked sites. This average is not only substantially greater than most other niche sites, but is also a 300% increase from our previous referral average.

Other key areas of growth:

• Our combined e-mail and RSS subscriber base has grown from 1,000 to 2,500;
• Registered members have grown from 2,000 to 6,000+;
• Total submissions have increased from 2,700 to almost 12,000;
• Total comments have increased from 1,250 to over 4,000;
• Total Tips have increased from 25,000 to over 70,000.

With an average of 60 new user registrations a day and an average of over 100 new story submissions per day (excluding spam, little of which gets through thanks to our algorithm and our wonderful moderator, Tamar), we are already your premier financial news community on the Web.

As you can see, we’ve had an incredible response since our launch the momentum is growing. We’re quite excited by the response we’re getting, and it motivates us to continue to improve the site and bring amazing new features for you to use and enhance your experience. Before we discuss our features, let’s take a look at some of the new relationships we’ve built in the past few months.

Welcome to the Family

Of course by now you’re familiar with our fabulous launch partners (without whose help Tip’d would certainly not be where it is today), and our additional partners who have continued to support Tip’d. As we’ve mentioned before we are continuing to pursue relationships with the best financial news and opinion sites. While these relationships take time to develop, today we are proud and excited to announce the latest in our great group of partners. Please welcome WalletPop to the family.

Walletpop is a personal finance blog written by a group of dedicated smart savers and smart spenders, including Ken and Daria Dolan, home improvement expert Tom Kraeutler, tax and fraud expert Tracy Coenen, budget travel expert Jason Cochran, consumer watchdog reporter Mitch Lipka, deal experts DealSeekingMom and CouponCravings and numerous others. This varied team offers consumers the low-down on what’s worth buying and what’s a ripoff, plus ways to make better use of a buck (especially the dollar store expert, Marlene Alexander). Walletpop has recently launched a video series called Loose Change that takes to the streets for episodes on various ways to deal with the current lousy economy.

In addition to using our submission buttons on their site and participating on Tip’d, they will also be featuring a weekly roundup column on their site highlighting the best posts from Tip’d, so even more of a reason to submit your excellent content for consideration by our community and theirs!

Big New Features

So now that you know what our community has been doing, let’s go over what we’ve been cooking for you behind the scenes.

Video tour of the new Tip’d 2.0 features:

1. Tip’d SocialTickers — The biggest feature we’re announcing today is the launch of SocialTickers. Tip’d SocialTickers are pages that track any given stock ticker across the Social Web (examples: see the Google, Inc. SocialTicker, or the Amazon.com, Inc. SocialTicker). They feature the latest Tip’d stories, blog posts, Delicious bookmarks, tweets, and links to other social or data resources for more information on every stock listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ. By visiting the SocialTickers main page you can see the most popular SocialTicker pages on Tip’d. Why just get a quote when you can get so much more information on your favorite tickers via SocialTickers? Also, be sure to use ticker symbols as tags when submitting a new story to Tip’d.
   
2. Tip’d Video Integration — Finance news doesn’t just come in article format; there are a lot of great newsworthy videos being released every day. With the launch of Tip’d 2.0 we’re giving you the ability to share your favorite business and finance related videos with the Tip’d community. Submitting a video is just as simple as submitting any other link, and watching a video is even easier. For all YouTube and Google videos, you can simply click on a video you want to watch and it plays in an overlay on your current page (no need to load another page). Furthermore, you can subscribe to get the latest popular video submissions directly from the Tip’d video feed.
   
3. Tip’d Inviter Tool — We’ve released an inviter tool that allows any Tip’d user to invite their contacts from a Web-based e-mail address book or social networking platform such as Twitter or Facebook. To make it easier for you, and to make sure you don’t end up annoying your friends, the tool tells you in advance which friends of yours are already registered members on the site, and which ones have already been invited. Use the tool carefully, but definitely give it a try!
4. Tip’d Facebook Application — If you haven’t already joined the 199 (and counting) other members on the Tip’d Facebook Fan Page, head on over and join now! While you’re at it, also check out our recently launched Tip’d Facebook Application that lets you show your friends the latest stories from Tip’d.
5. Tip’d Top 100 — Unlike many other big social news sites, we’ve always been the first to acknowledge the contribution of our community in making Tip’d a success. Since day one we’ve had a list of our top Tip’d community members and have even highlighted them on our blog. Today we’re taking that one step further to also acknowledge the top content producing domains that allow this participation to take place on Tip’d. Just as without community members wouldn’t exist, without the wonderful content being created by these blogs and bloggers (who, by the way, happen to also be some of our top community members), we would have nothing to read, share, and discuss. Curious who’s the #1 publisher on Tip’d? You’ll have to click through to find out!
6. Top Tip’d Ambassadors — We want to give our community the credit it deserves for every single action that the individual members take. We already acknowledge your participation on the site using our top community members list. Now we’re taking the idea one step further with our list of top Tip’d ambassadors. The list will highlight the users that have been recruiting more members to our community (by using the inviter tool) on a monthly basis.
7. Tip’d Greatest Hits — Want to spend some time just browsing the most popular stories to have ever been featured on the homepage of Tip’d? Head over to our greatest hits page and find out which items have received the all-time largest amounts of Tips.

Bug Fixes and Usability Improvements

But wait; there’s more! We’ve also been working hard to improve the stability and performance of existing features.

1. Improved Submission Process — We have made the submission process both easier and faster and have upgraded our submission bookmarklet so you have to fill in even fewer fields than before. (I.e. it automatically imports the title of the page you’re submitting.)
2. More Robust Promotion Algorithm — We have updated our content promotion algorithm to ensure better quality and more consistency in terms of what gets “published” (promoted to the home page) and how frequently new stories appear. Don’t worry; we never have and never will handicap specific domains or users (unless they spam or otherwise abuse the site of course).
3. Improved Moderation Methods — Along with our content promotion algorithm, we also have a spam detecting and moderating algorithm. We have updated it with additional anti-spam measures to make sure the end user experience is always improving. Of course our goal is to limit human intervention as much as possible, but until our technology can get there we have the wonderful Tamar helping moderate any spam that manages to sneak through.
4. Improved Search — Tip’d search has been improved to provide you with more relevant results and now also allows you to search by domain.
5. Improved RSS Feeds — We’ve improved feed delivery stability, and all feeds now display the URL of the content source for quick scanning. Don’t forget to subscribe.
6. Widget and Mashup Inclusion — If you don’t want to use the individual Tip’d button, you can now use a host of other mashups or widgets to get our button up on your site.
7. New Servers — We have upgraded our server capacity to ensure faster load times and eliminate any latency due to our submission buttons on your blog or site. (And our external “Tip It” button has its own dedicated server).
8. Other Fixes — In addition to the improvements mentioned above we have been making various other tweaks and have pushed live dozens of other bug fixes and incremental usability improvements to the CMS, the site, and the site’s design.

What Do You Think?

We want your feedback on Tip’d 2.0! Whether you find a bug that needs fixed, or you have another feature request, please let us know: either comment on this post, or email us at tipd@tipd.com. Cheers!

 
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