Reflections on #Tamebay@10 Part Three. Turning Commercial

Tamebay’s 10th birthday party is being held on the 10th of November 2016 in London. Our official birthday based on the published date of our first ever blog post is the 11th of November 2006, so as the clock strikes midnight we really will be a decade old.

As we head towards Tamebay’s 10th birthday, we’ll be looking back over the past decade in a series of posts… you have been warned 😉

The first year

The early days of Tamebay were pretty exciting. Posts were written, Sue and I had arguments over who would write what, mainly after the event when we’d both spotted something and pressed the publish button – there was no such thing as editorial collaboration and that’s something we had to learn over time.

Something else which Sue took upon herself to do was to edit my posts, ban me from posting if I’d been to the pub (which she asserted resulted in a certain misfunction in my ability to spell) and generally to try and educate me on things like commas and apostrophes.

Welcome ChannelAdvisor – Our first Advertiser

Almost without realising it a year passed and one day John Hayes, still a Tamebay friend and contributor today but then ChannelAdvisor UK’s Marketing Manager, phoned up and said “Hi Chris, would you consider hosting an advert from ChannelAdvisor on Tamebay?”

John reminisced today saying “I was delighted to be TameBay’s first advertiser. Coming from a newspaper publishing background, prior to my work with technology companies like ChannelAdvisor and iContact, I understood that Chris and Sue (and latterly Dan) were doing an amazing job of building a real community around the online marketplace space. This was a community of small business owners I wanted to engage with on a commercial basis. However, I also saw real value in supporting what I saw as an authentic and incredibly positive editorial platform that could eventually become (and I believe it has) the news and information resource of choice for many people involved in the online marketplace/eCommerce industries.”

This was a turning point for Tamebay both from a financial and a credibility viewpoint. Once we had an advertiser more companies wanted to engage with Tamebay both for editorial and for advertising. Partners who advertised with Tamebay wanted to maximise their investment and started sharing their news with Tamebay.

From a hobby to a business

Success bred success and Tamebay got busier with more readers, published more news and slowly advertising revenue started to grow until the site actually paid for itself instead of being funded by Sue and myself. We invested the money to visit eBay in the US at eBay Live and pay down some of the costs associated with running a site which was becoming ever busier, including moving to a new ISP.

Our ISP at the time was shared hosting and the day came when the ISP suggested we might like to get our own server. Tamebay’s traffic was impacting their other customers and that along with a revenue stream told us that we no longer had a hobby site – Tamebay had gone commercial and was now a business.

10th Birthday Party

We’d love you to come to our 10th Birthday Party and also to vote for the Readers Choice award celebrating 10 years of Tamebay.

If you would like to come to the party drop me an email as we’ve still got a few free editors tickets left to give away.