DevHub is launching to the public today with a solution that enables users to create and publish multiple websites and offers a way to monetize them in the same process.
The web-based commercial publishing platform isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but DevHub lets web publishers tap into a fairly large aggregated network of sites and affiliate networks with the use of an API, boasting deals with more than 35 internet properties such as Careerbuilder, Superpages, Shopping.com, Priceline, Homegain, etc.). The startup says this integrated monetization approach, the rich WYSIWYG editing capabilities and the extensive reporting features are what set them apart from other online website building tools (and there are many of those).
During the private beta, the Seattle company had already over 55,000 sites developed with the centralized platform, and today it is entering public beta allowing anyone to sign up and take it for a ride. The company claims it takes 5-10 minutes to set up a website, so you don’t need to refrain from testing for lack of time.
They also have an interesting way of going about signing up new users: while a DevHub user can manage an unlimited number of sites on the DevHub platform, they must pass a quality threshold for their first set of 10 sites before being allowed seats for their next 10. It’s unclear what this quality test entails exactly.
The product is targeted primarily at wannabe internet entrepreneurs looking to build an online media network without a lot of technical know-how.
DevHub, actually a product from the company EVO Media Group, is backed by the same angel group behind BuddyTV and the icanhascheezeburger.com / failblog.com sites. They’ve been working on the platform for the past 1.5 years on less than $1 million from the private investors.
I will test it soon. thanks for the info.
It sure can be a game changer!
Wow..what an awesome website. Scared about the mandatory hosting solution but if the hosting is sufficient…WOW.
Testing it right away, thanks for blogging about it techcrunch.
“DevHub will pay the User a percentage of all revenues generated by the User’s sites. For qualified Users’ sites, if an Internet user clicks on an advertising banner or link, performs a revenue-generating action, or lands on a page that generates revenue from an impression, then the resulting revenue share generated shall be credited to the User account and displayed in the DevHub Reporting Dashboard in an amount determined at DevHub’s sole discretion (”Revenue Balance”).”
I do not feel comfortable with the idea of “DevHub’s sole discretion” power about displaying stats about revenue. It should be more open and transparent.
“Users who participate in DevHub’s Service will be paid via PayPal or check.”
I also with that they arranges wire transfer and Western Union options for international publishers.
This devhub service is subpar at best, don’t be fooled by slick talking sales people.
EvoLanding did so bad, they had to change the name.
Think about it, name change? Why?
DevHub is sooo great?
When you get sand boxed by google for their crap good luck.
Yep… like thetruth said..
DO NOT be fooled by Mark and Geoff’s slick sales talk. They’ll feed you with FALSE PROMISES and make you feel like you can make some awesome revenue generating site with their crummy “platform”
There other projects failed just as this one will and it’s pretty funny actually to see them try to do “the web thing” once again. They don’t know anything about the web and only know about slick talking people into their schemes.
Stay Away.
Both of u are obviously sound like a couple of disgruntled X-employees. Sounds like they missed the launch. That’s too bad, I think this one has some huge potential…
@thetruth
“The new name better reflects is goal of enabling people to develop web sites..”
http://domainna...ew-domain-names
I created one account to test the service, and I don’t know if it’s the TechCrunch effect but the site was initially quick, but now it’s becoming slow and I cannot save my changes…
The test domain isn’t resolving yet:
http://www.blogspacetoday.com
The other projects they built died as well, down2night.com died a slow death, this one just has funding but it will die like the other projects they built.
Interesting thread.
So did a little web sleuthing and looks like thetruth and theinvestor is this guy: http://www.jour...0309/1002/LOCAL
Nothing more than a domain squatter. Scum of the Internet…
Nameserver trace for http://www.blogspacetoday.com:
* Looking for who is responsible for root zone and followed m.root-servers.net.
* Looking for who is responsible for com and followed i.gtld-servers.net.
* Looking for who is responsible for blogspacetoday.com and followed ns1.gammagrid.com.
Nameservers for http://www.blogspacetoday.com:
* ns1.gammagrid.com returned (NORECORDS)
* ns2.gammagrid.com returned (NORECORDS)
It would appear they have not posted your domain in their DNS.
Hope this helps.
Jerry
It looks like its resolving now
I set up an account to try it out. Its sticky navigating the application. Doesn’t seem to be a good place to go if you want to really customize your site. I’d like to see an option where you can import and existing site without having to create one from scratch. I like the idea of the service but I think it needs to be very flexible and open for it to be successful in attracting users.
You can read this and other quality blogs in an easy to read newspaper format at:
http://www.Libe...tynewsprint.com
Check it out.
are you kidding? what a piece of junk.
Hello Jerry,
Still nothing, and when I now try to save changes in my sites the preloader starts but never finishes…
Anyone having success? It seems an interesting service, maybe they are just overloaded.
there’s no way to add subdomain pages beyond the first level.
also, no way to easily blog. maybe you can pull in a feed from an existing blog with a widget (haven’t tried it yet).
you can’t change the design after the initial selection. but you can’t tell what the design options look like before you choose (or if you can look at the options, it’s not intuitive).
it won’t let you add a site with a URL that you own. it’s posting a message “some sites are invalid”. bad messaging, because i can’t tell if the site is being slammed or if the site has my owned URL.
so far, not good.
Well ive taken a look at it and it doesn’t look too good. the interface looks all nice and flashy but it doesn’t FUNCTION well.
EvoLanding was so bad they had the change their name…. lol. I agree with most people here that devhub isn’t quite what it’s hyped up to be. try using it and you’ll agree with me.
Everything is so sticky, slow, and un-editable.
Not good at all…
All of these systems like synthasite, dev hub, google sites, are just template based systems. and there is a market for that….but, its not game changing…these have been around for years. The only one I see that may have a chance is Sitemasher.
I am sure the 3 amigo’s Daniel, Mark and their sidekick VC guy, are all living the high life in their fancy apartments eating out at fancy resto’s, its not their money that they are spending. $1 million buys a lot of steak dinners and $40 cigars.
What this comment got to do with technical evaluation
It has EVERYTHING to do with it.
Money spent on non-essential things is a waste of investors money. They do a lot of it, look at what they did with down2night.com and did a live webcast of a party?
Technically, if you read other comments about service, I don’t think I have to dog them more there, just that when people take investors $$ they need to take care of it and spent each dollar carefully. If the $1 million was there money, no big deal.
As cheerfuldragon said, there’s no way to blog, which translates to: There’s no way to add new content quickly and efficiently.
You would have to create a separate blog on Wordpress and use the RSS feed widget to tap into your posts.
I definitely see a huge market for a service that would allow the “Average Joe” with very little computer savvy but plenty of Subject Matter Expertise in another field to get a full featured site up and running that did the following:
1. Allowed them to add useful content that would draw traffic.
2. Easily integrated with an existing affiliate network system allowing them to make money online for content publishing.
DevHub does not accomplish this and I’m curious if anyone knows a system that does.
Um. Per your comment this looks like exactly the market they are going after. Very cool idea and seems like the Debhubbers need to keep shaping the platform to the tune of the crowd. We want blog!!!
“other web builders don’t even have monetization figured out…. This could be BIG!!
i’d rather buy 4 dollar web hosting from godaddy or hostgator and install a blog… throw up some affiliate links, upload a free template, and ads of my own and fly away, then deal with some middle man who takes half of my money and where i have no control over the server or whether it’s even reliably hosted…
they could be sucking out numbers from your income and you would never even know it. i wouldn’t trust how reliable the hosting is or their numbers when it comes to revenues…
move along.
I would too! But lots of people don’t know how to do this!
There are loads of budding internet entrepreneurs who would love a few extra dollars per month.
Thanks Jason and Robin for the post regarding our launch!
We appreciate the feedback and excitement from all the new users on DevHub and we understand that the platform must continue to evolve quickly to address the needs of our users.
Per comments and feedback already, we have made a number of fixes to DNS lag earlier,
squashed a few site-editing bugs, increased site editing speed (TC effect aside), site-preview before DNS change is now available, and we are working on blog solution as we speak (which is more than just placing text within a template, think modular).
Aside from attentively addressing bugs and feature requests, we will continue to roll-out new partner modules with some very cool features on a regular basis. We’ve got a number of these already on deck…
Keep cool TC flamers.
Best,
-Geoff
DevHub.com
Why didn’t you mention where you got the idea for the company? and what was promised to him?
And you continue to only put the idea’s that were given to you 2 years ago and not branch out to the other 2/3 of what needs to be done?
Adding another RSS feed or content scrapping tool doesn’t count.
If you want your product to scale you need to stop programming in PHP4 OOP from 2002 on PHP5 servers, for starters. More consulting will cost you, I will say Daniel is good but needs to learn PHP 5 OOP methods.
Soon you will see what the other 2/3 are, the best stuff comes out of LA baby.
Hey gang!! I was just informed that they are addressing the very big need of publishing tied to monetization diving in now.
I don’t know of any parking company or web site building tool that allows the site developer to seamlessly integrate such a wide array of top tier advertisers… Is the platform perfect? No. But it is evolving quickly into unchartered territory and shows incredible promise. I’ve used the Evo platform for over a year now and have always found these guys to be helpful and responsive.
Probably because you were cute.
A lot of people comments have been deleted, the count was 40 now just 32. I didn’t see any spam.
I got this email from the “co-founder”
SUBJECT: could you please stop–Mark A. Michael
Best regards,
Mark A. Michael
SVP of Sales & Strategic Marketing/ Co-Founder
p. 206.441.4399
EVO Media Group | DevHub
2101 4th and Blanchard Building, Seattle WA
Found this on domain name wire.. looks like devhub scraped email addresses from trafficz (http://domainna...pens-to-public/) and is now making it seem like they opt’d-in to receive their emails…
“How about mentioning the fact that when Trafficz, by mistake, emailed all the clients via cc and not bcc, disclosing everyone’s emails, DevHub collected those emails and is now spamming that list. Furthermore, the email states the following at the top:
“Thank you for signing up for notification of DevHub’s launch — we are now live!”
Signing up? The email address I use is exclusively tied to my trafficz account, in this case trafficzacct@MYDOMAIN.com”
geesh
I don’t see any basis for these negative comments. I have been using it and has worked very well.
Well this is pretty interesting. I went the route of Wordpress + Magpie RSS + Adsense for the past year and have made about $200 on what should have been a much more lucrative site. I don’t have much spare time to work on it, so I’m fine with making what amounts to $50 an hour from it. But a tool like this has the potential to put me in a much better spot. Agree that blogging tools and some more refined content import (e.g. Youtube or Vimeo video import/search rather than generic “video” modules) would be nice, but this is a good start.
Don’t know the personal dynamics involved here, but seems like this would be a good time to start a competitor if you’ve got a bone to pick. Lots of feedback here.
I am really disappointed with Tech Crunch… I always try out the products that you mention and usually they’re cool things but this website builder stinks. I dont want to bash, but the usability is horrible. There are a lot of bugs and other things that shouldnt be there if they did the proper testing and took the time to go through it.
Please only recommend things that you have personally tried first. This was a waste of time.
I know having “Beta” in the name allows you to get away with certain things, I do it too but come on…
I’ve been using the system and I think it works for what I need. Probably not for the most technorati crowd but is for the masses. Ignore the flames and Keep going guys!!!
Took me about little less than an hour, not minutes to create a pretty cool site on dog training. Definitely better tthan fumbling around ok wordpress and their plugins.
Also looks like they have been pushing out enhancements pretty quick. We’ll see if they can keep up…
@Peter how is wordpress easier than devhub? I have not tried their service yet but in my experience with WP there is a bit of a learning curve to make sites look right and more than just a blog.
Seems like an interesting service for the novice web user trying to get in the webdev/affiliate game. Will try it out and post thoughts…
Also, any other affiliates you recommend?
Thanks– Max.
Evo is an interesting company, while the people there are friendly and convincing enough (Mark would and could sell a heater to a snowman), the business plan always seemed half completed.
Their auto-generated parked sites have zero original content and a lot of them have been sandboxed by google, their response to that, create more blog and news scrapers… no original content = google death.
Dev Hub of course give you the ability to add content to your site, but not easily. Wordpress and cheap web hosting are better than what they offer.
Their awesome feeds that they offer don’t really pay that well, the average cpm is pretty low because of their low quality score with their companies.
Overall I’d say you are better off with wordpress and a cheap web host and using adsense plus some affiliate’s like neverblue or incentaclick… but thats just me, don’t let me stop you from trying it out, I mean worse comes to worse you get your site sandboxed, or lose a few months of development on a domain name…..
Good luck to everyone,
-Peter Daugherty
P.S – I did intern with them this summer for a short time and enjoyed it a lot, like I said, nice guys, not so great business
@Peter sorry I posted to wrong comment. See reply above your post.
@Max K.
- with dev hub you have to make a new page, and on that new page a new content module, and then you have to type into that.
With wordpress you only have post a new article, and it creates new pages for you as well as posting it on the homepage. It also is very easy to SEO. And with wordpress you can buy or create themes that make it look unlike a blog if you want. There are also a huge amount of themes out there that are already made that are free to use.
And there are a ton of good affiliates out there.
sounds to me like what DH needs is a blogging type of module in their platform and open up to allow for CSs templates and an api for other plugins. just finished making a site on their platform and it was pretty straightforward and speedy process. Only thing I would say is they def need to work thru some bugs but it’s pretty solid imho.
also maybe more templates? But the various mpnetization module thing is pretty cool – beats typical text or display ads or affiliate links. also wish they would tell users what they actually are going to be adding next. A few entertainment type modules would def spif up my site…
Yeah! Just finished creating a couple sites on their platform and i think it rocks. I tried out other wysiwyg editors (weebly, synthasite) and this is definitely more than just a site creation tool with reporting and ways to monetize. Good job u guys and keep building more modules!!!!!
I am recommending to my entrepreneurship club here at school. Easy fun way to make some beer money!
Used it, and not impressed… They should have waited longer before going live, now its too late and people (including me) already have a bad taste.
Just got their newsletter. Looks like they made a lot of progress addressing fixes in past few days though.
Some of user sites they features actually look pretty good: troutfishing.ca, youlift.org, dealstovegas.com, breakingupishard.com. Let’s see how these fresh sites get picked up on SEs.
Need to work on mine now…,
Yup got that too. looks like they are listening and adapting fast to users wishes. Can’t wait to try out their blogging module– looks like they will be adding that soon. If it works well, could potentially see ppl switching off of wordpress.
The “new” DevHub is very exciting and getting better every day. I love the new features with more apparently coming each week. It’s going to get bigger and bigger. The Evo (DevHub) guys are very responsive and open to input.
The “featured” sites on the last DevHub update letter – DealsToVegas.com – TroutFishing.ca – YouLift.org – and BreakingUpIsHard.com look very nice and quite professional, especially for only being a few days old.
Keep up the Great work!
EvoLanding.com = DevHub.com
WhyPark.com
These type of are all the same without continuing new original content the domain/website will be sandboxed. Along with all the domains on the same IP ranges.
Slight variations:
aeiou.com minisite, statis content SEO’able, least likey to get sandboxed by google.
squidoo.com, mini ad pages which got hammered by google for bad content, though it still drives some traffic.
To confirm my analysis from a domainer who is on top of making money from domains:
http://namemone.../december-2008/
Domain development remains an elusiveoption. WhyPark is probably the easiest pseudo-development platform, but the Google duplicate content penalty continues to loom large over their business model. EvoLanding is beta testing a development platform, but based onpast experience, I can’t really recommend them.
Long time ‘domainer’ here that is done with domaining. I have profited for a number of years being so lucky to have purchased, parked, and sold domains for a number of years. You all know who I am by name.
What people like happytimes fail to realize is that domaining is dead. It’s time to move on and looking for solutions that try to stay one step ahead of google is not the right approach anymore. That is what current parking solutions are still trying to do and that is what the WhyParks of the world continue to perpetuate.
If you great sites of real value with real, original content, you are securing your domains for the long term, a word the domainer community still fails to understand. You are also now an owner of assets that are no longer playing the cat and mouse game with the ad networks, who just so happen to also be the search engines.
The Evo guys have created something that is worlds away from the evolanding solution they provided to the domaining industry. I encourage you to actually try this new solution out. Many of you will realize how it enables the Domainer community to finally create this long term value – but it is not a simple push the button and earn money, it takes a little work (another word the Domainer community needs to get their head around).
We’ve got to adapt to the times and embrace solutions that are there for us to move us forward. Let’s move beyond the name, practices, and paradigm of the Domainer for no matter what we do,
Domainer = squatter.
Well said.
Jist signed up today and went through their system. Congrats to these guys on the complex platform they built. This is no easy task guys – from their editor to their partner modules to their reporting and more – wow. Gotta give credit where credit is due.
I also applaud their checks on quality so it doesn’t end up being a squidoo or these generic parking engines.
Good job guys and u have my support!
I was one of the fortunate ones to be involved during DevHub’s beta testing. Evo Landing (DevHub)approved and created a few of my websites. Now that DevHub is up and running, the process for non-technical entrepreneurs, like myself, to build-out a network of web sites is relatively easy, albeit with some detailed work, relative content and a lot of follow through. An example of one of my active sites relating to the best travel ” deals to Vegas ” is DealsToVegas.com
I am continuing to update the website daily as anyone would do with their site. The DevHub system improves almost daily. I highly recommend them over any domain parking company, if you can meet their quality standards.
Don’t know if this thread is still active. But just wanted to let you all know looks like they just launched blogging feature that is drag and drop. Gotta give it up for these guys and their ability to react to the calls of the crowd.
Like how they also have a weekly newsletter and always have something new for us every week! Keep it up you guys…
EvoLanding fails to bring Income
DateMonday, October 6, 2008 at 8:02PM
Like other domainers, I had high hopes for EvoLanding. In most cases their sites looked really great. I parked around 70 domains with them some months back and I was pleased with the content-rich sites that they created. Their business model seems to be automated content creation that includes media such as video. They urged me to keep my domains there so that they would gradually build traffic and income. It never happened.
I’m not alone in this. Christine posted on NamePros to share a similar experience. She reported:
http://namemone...ing-income.html
The new system has the same problems, just no money. Read my blog for more updates.
To anyone else who’s created devhub sites I’ve created a forum for us to collaborate. For some reason devhub.com hasn’t set up a forum yet! Let people know who use devhub about devhubforum.com
Searching for devhub site owners or potential owners. Come help start a community at http://devhubforum.com. Get help for making your websites and promote your site.
As for everything that’s been said good or bad, I think that it still has a good amount of room to grow to improve usability and ease of use. I think however, it’s done the monetization thing very well and with some patience you can make a resonable site. My best example is http://bestcomputersetup.com .. which because of the platform I was able to spend 95% of my time working on content.