DevHub Reviewed ... Again

It was a year ago that I did my first review of DevHub - and came away impressed. I continued using the platform to develop a geo domain and some other product names. The more I used it, the more limitations and frustrations I found. The glitz and glamor of drag and drop site design very quickly fades and the underlying functionality of the tools you are provided starts to show some serious holes.

That's not to say I haven't had any success. In fact, I've gotten ranked for various keywords and in total my half dozen sites that weren't getting any significant traffic parked are now receiving an average of around 700 visitors a month or so the last few months. Most of that is to one site in particular - an adult toy, exact match .US domain (and largely due to Yahoo ranking it #2). And at various times, my other sites would pop up on the first page of a search engine and I'd get some nice traffic spikes. So there's traffic and it's gotten to be fairly consistent. So let's talk about the next step: revenue.

The revenue is horrible

My RPM (revenue per 1k page views) is just as bad as my worst performing parked domains. Someone else may have a different experience, but in my book, generating < $2 in revenue in a month where I had over 2k page views is just pathetic. Is it because the sites aren't optimized? Entirely possible, but honestly I don't know *how* to improve the performance because DevHub provides absolutely no metrics about where that revenue is coming from save their breakdown by CPA, CPM, CPC, etc. What I need to know is *which* products are working, which affiliate offers are producing and which ones aren't (one could argue none of them are working but I'll get to that in a second).

And then when they do break down on a daily basis where the revenue is coming from, a disturbing picture appears: the CPA is horrible! On many, many occasions, the CPA is a single penny. CPA! That means someone bought something, took an action... and my share is a whole freakin' penny. Even at a 50/50 split of Amazon CPA revenue, assuming Amazon is paying it's a mere 3-4% commission, it means that the product that was purchased had to have been worth less than a dollar! And that's assuming a very demanding 50/50 split. Honestly the split has to be a lot worse than that for those numbers to work out, but as they don't tell you the split, they don't tell you the products that were purchased, they don't tell you the ad unit that was clicked... You have no idea!

Now onto the review!

But this is a review of the newly redesigned DevHub, not a condemnation of their revenue sharing (okay, it's both!). The new look of DevHub is really fun, with lots of game design elements and "social networking" features. That is, if you define social networking features as tons of popup spam telling to you "share this on face book and twitter". The game design features are an interesting twist as you get points and coins as rewards for adding more content to your site and customizing it's layout using the same rather limited theming tools that were available before. There are least a half dozen things in the "marketplace" for you to purchase with your coins or you cold hard cash - things that were essentially available to you without having to spend your coins or cold hard cash before. This is a new feature and the marketplace just launched, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that the marketplace will eventually be flushed out. But if the marketplace is as ignored as the widgets were in the previous release, then I don't think the game concept is going to be anything but a nuisance. The good news is that you can apparently turn the game elements off, but the only setting I found to do this is in my account settings and when I tried to turn it off it said that data was required. I'm guessing in order to change the game elements, I have to also reset my password. Who knows.

In my original reviews, I identified a number of issues that bothered me regarding things like duplicate products being displayed (at varying prices), widgets not working at all, missing features (like creating my own directory site), etc. Surely, a year later and a whole new version being launched will mean that these basic problems will be addressed, right? Nope. Oh, the broken widgets aren't broken any more.. they are just gone. There are a few new features that have snuck in like the ability to include your twitter feed, but the "product selection" process is still just as broken as before. They now offer you the choice of which product feed you want to use - Amazon, Shopping.com or Pop Shops, but even inside those feeds you get duplicates. You still can't hide a product you don't want displayed either, so it becomes a frustrating game of "if I create 3 product feeds of 1 product each with just the right search keywords I'll be able to display the list of products I really want". And without dipping into your own google adsense or other ad provider accounts, you won't have any choice over the type, layout, etc of the ad unit you want to display.

To sum up

You might think I hate DevHub, but really, I don't. I do hate the closed nature of it - especially in regards to reporting, the poor revenue share, the risk of being delisted at any moment when Google finally gets sick of them, the lack of focus on making the product better and more useful (instead of the current focus on making it more "fun") and limited design options... but other than that, it's a fine platform! Really! If you want to just throw a site up and put a few monetization features on it, then it certainly works for that... I've spent less than an hour per site and those 6 hours or so of time have yielded a whopping $20 in revenue from various sources - mostly in the last 6 months. That's a yearly rate of maybe $50 - enough to cover the registration fees for those 6 domains.

Until DevHub gets serious about helping developers optimize and profit from their site, there's really no reason to invest heavily in the platform. Instead, invest in building your own solutions, buying off the shelf products and keeping 100% of the revenue for the extra effort. If nothing else, you'll sleep a lot better knowing you aren't at the whim of DevHub.