Great idea, good execution, reasonable traction, no future. That’s what it boils down to with the latest entry to the deadpool: Totlol, a video destination site that aggregates the best videos suitable for kids from YouTube with the help of a community of parents and toddlers, is closing down. When Erick reviewed the service back in November 2008, he deemed the service an impressive alternative to traditional Saturday morning TV cartoon watching and “children’s Web video for the children of the YouTube generation”.
Unfortunately, while the initiative clearly struck a chord with thousands of parents and their kids, one-man company / Totlol developer Ron Ilan sees no future for the website:
“My focus over the past year has been on making Totlol the best video web site for kids and parents out there. I think I succeeded. It got great reviews. It has been copied and borrowed from. It is packed with features. It has an iPhone web app. It has an active user community. It is growing. Last month Totlol was visited 150,000 times.
While building Totlol I was constantly looking for ways to make it sustainable. I failed. A “normal” website would just “fill up” with ads, but Totlol is not a “normal” site. There are two things that set harsh limits on what can be done – the target audience and the usage of the YouTube platform. With Totlol you just can’t do what other websites do.
It is now June 2009, more than a year has gone by, and I find myself running a website that is loved and growing but has no future. It needs a long term sponsor and I can’t find one. I just can’t support and develop it all by myself anymore.
So, it is now time to say goodbye.”
Vancouver-based Ilan is shutting the site down for good on Canada Day, July 1st.
Someone sponsor the man!
Right on! what about Parenting mag? They should step in, give their seal of approval and sponsor it. Or nick.com could send some of their programming to the site with links to purchase the dvd’s. I hate trying to find the backyardigans at target. It’s impossible. I’d rather download to apple tv or buy on this guys site.
Why would any company sponsor this?
Look at the Alexa stats, it gets almost no traffic. There is no proprietary technology, indeed, it is something that one guy can put together in an evening using some apis and free open source software.
The company would be better off hiring someone in India to clone this, which would cost at most US$500. They can then launch in under their own brand instead of a hard to spell brand.
There is nothing special about this that someone with some basic development skills cannot put together in a few hours.
It belongs in the Deadpool for sure.
Where can I find someone capable of adding a database to my website or building a site like totlol… dnfi@comcast.net
About $100 a month should cover the cost of running the site on a dedicated server.
100,000 visits? It doesn’t take that much infastrcuture to display a website that uses Youtube for the backend.
I think the point is if there’s no future… why spend $100 a month?
But it’s not just keeping it running that is the problem. Providing visitor support and keeping spammers/attackers away probably take up a decent amount of time. Spending that time *plus* not seeing any financial light at the end of the tunnel must have contributed to his decision.
Hey Ron Ilan,
As a fellow Vancouverite & father, I’d love to talk to you about either partnering up or taking over the site altogether.
I’ve sent you an email. Please contact us.
Thanks.
FSD
Totlol was a nice site, but apparently lacked a sustainable business model. Since this article, I found a new kids video site that my children actually prefer. It’s called http://www.Kideos.com.
Thanks for telling us about Kideos.com. I checked it out and my two kids absolutely loved their videos! My kids are huge fans of Elmo, Thomas the Tank Engine and Dr. Seuss. I bookmarked Kideos and know that I’ll be going back to it a lot in the future.
Does the YouTube TOS prevent him from running ads on the site? I’m surprised he couldn’t get advertising dollars from any one of a number of companies that sell products for children.
Pity. One of the few websites that seemed to be well positioned and executed. Just shows the importance of having a revenue model upfront.
I’m sure many parents would have paid a modest subscription fee.
Hope someone buys it out.
I have a crazy thought. I know this will blow your minds. Ready?
Charge users.
If they see a REAL value. They WILL pay.
oh oh oh ? wait wait.. here’s a thought. you can’t.
Yeah you can.
Since it’s for kids I will agree with you that parents will pay. But don’t go about extending this logic to regular websites.
If they were allowed to charge for their service as a youtube filter, as a parent who loves using it, I would have gladly paid a monthly fee.
Personally, I am surprised they lasted as long as they did!
RT
http://www.priv...cy-center.de.tc
This is truly sad. Totlol is a great experience for kids, with a community of parents filtering appropriate content. It is one of the best examples of a (one-man) site built on YouTube’s APIs. My kids love it.
Maybe it was the name.
Eric, the name was the first thing that I loved about the site. I would bet that most of the parents pronounce it “tottle” however.
My kid loved it too! Every night before bed we would watch a few videos. This is one site that will be missed.
One of his favorite: http://bit.ly/lBieu
If you cannot make money from 150,000 visitors a month, then you should not be in business.
You want an obvious way? Just get on the phone and tell toy companies you have 150,000 kids monthly watching your site. Then you just link over to some toy websites.
You’ll make a million dollars in 6 months.
I guess you’ve never worked in advertising before
150,000 per month? Try 24,000 (http://siteanal...com/totlol.com/)
“It is now June 2009, more than a year has gone by, and I find myself running a website that is loved and growing but has no future.”
It’s called a business plan. Apparently they don’t have those in Canada.
Even the BDC, Business Development Crown Queen Majesty’s Corporation, had no idea what a business plan was when I showed them one.
And they’re responsible for the redistribution of wealth from successful businesses to unsuccessful ones.
It’s true — I pitched an idea to the BDC once, they looked at my business plan and actually laughed. Then they put the queen on speaker phone and laughed more! “You can’t PLAN a business”, they said.
They said our business plan interfered with their investment in Nitix, which promptly failed about 6 months later, then they eventually sold it to IBM at the tax payer expense.
Nitix had modified Debian linux with a few cheapo tools and rebranded it as Nitix Blue, which is now the lotus foundation IBM product.
They had not released all the modifications under the GPL license they were supposed to and IBM still has not, because the project is still being developed by the same team. IE, people that use GPL software but have no idea that they are obligated to distribute the source code when they make the modified public domain software public.
So BDC violated the GPL with Nitix, they then made a flurry of investments based on personal connections, and they made their friends rich at the expense of the tax payers.
http://network....-make-wine.aspx
Farm credit canada, a crown corporation like BDC gave a mafia boss a million dollars to start a vinyard in merry Quebec, where posting an English sign or creating English only software is a crime punishable by a 20,000 dollar fine.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_Gagliano
“La Presse reported that Gagliano was the bookkeeper for Agostino Cuntrera, cousin of cocaine baron Alfonso Caruana, who was involved in a gangland slaying of Paul Violi in Montreal in 1978. Cuntrera was subsequently convicted of murder.[3] Gagliano denies any links to the Mafia.[4] Gagliano now resides with his family in the United States since 2006, and no further charges have been brought against him.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsorship_scandal
Socialism doesn’t work and this is why. Russia had the same problem. When you redistribute wealth and destroy small business, you create a situation where a powerful crime family can essentially take over the government.
In Canada, you are not a small business owner, you are:
nytimes.com/2008/04/20/business/20suits.html
“This is a pure case of savage capitalism,”
A “savage capitalist”, trying to exploit the 6th grade educated foreign language speaking public locals to make your eventual bankruptcy a little less bad.
The Canadian resources are truly invaluable, which is why they make their own citizens pay 55% fuel tax when they have massive oil reserves in Alberta, and make small business owners pay 70% income tax until they are broke.
Oh, did I mention the government of Canada is full of Mafia leaders?
I mean who do they do this in the name of? They people?
“Her Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and House of Commons of Canada, enacts as follows: ”
laws.justice.gc.ca/en/notice/index.html?redirect=%2Fen%2FShowFullDoc%2Fcs%2FB-9.9%2F%2F%2Fen
Oh, no, I guess they do it with the authority of the biggest mafia leader of all time, the british monarchy and it’s head.
Why aren’t there more successful startups from Canada?
I wonder. I guess I will just have to keep wondering. Nothing posted above has anything to do with the 100% failure rate there at all. Nope.
The only way you can ever get a small business project going there is if the mafia starts it, and you are getting a check from the government itself.
Gagliano was under investigation by the FBI for being a member off the NY bonano family, while he was in office as the minister of public works in Gatineau.
The public works dept of Canada is responsible for handing out ALL TECHNOLOGY contracts for software development and EDP. They do so in small part through MERX.com which itself is flawed, but in large part through contracts for personal gift exchanges, which Gagliano did gratuitously.
Any honest company looking for a contract that paid for the MERX access was denied for the most part and still is under a similar system.
Gagliano was brought back to the US after serving as a Canadian official for 15 years and rumored to have made a deal to stay out of prison.
The US can hardly get gang members across the border so a lot of them run free, with jobs with the federal govt of Canada. These are the legislators of the Canadian parliamentary monarchy.
I seriously doubt there are enough parents out there that would pay for this to make it worthwhile. parents do not have unlimited funds and with club penguin’s, habbo and education sites pulling at the parent’s wallet, this has little chance.
Trevor…at a 1% ctr and and a high 5% buy rate on an average order of $50 with a 10% commission on sales, you will generate $375 a month, best case.
Sounds like enough to sustain the site growth for a one man show, or at least pay for the hosting bills.
Sounds like he is giving up on it way too fast, you cannot expect a content website that is only 1 year old to bring in huge profits or visitors.
The site can’t be expensive to run with all video and video thumbnails being served from youtube. Why not at least sell the website to someone that can keep it going? If the site continues to grow it would probably make a nice business for someone in 1-2 years time.
Jeezzzus! What a quitter!
We tried to send them an email thinking there was good synergy between our two companies but the response system they use must already be down if the want please contact us at charles @shogee.com
I bet he is just burnt out. Being a one man show is tiring as hell. I’m sure many of the people here can relate. (unless you grew up once grade schools started only doing projects in groups)
Ian did not say what the problem was flat out, but to get real revenue he has to have appropriately licensed content. That’s the YouTube problem. The other problem is advertising directly to toddlers probably isn’t the move on the small screen. On the big screen you get splash damage with the parents
iPhone app probably didn’t make sense either. I could see how her could easily take what he has learned and reroll the tech for another niche and get some Federate Media CPM love. Hell, he could federate the tech across several niches if he wanted to. He’s not quiting, he’s smart.
This is a classic case of a web developer building a great product, but not having the business experience to actually make money.
0 business model = 0 cash flow
There is so much opportunity for a product such as this. Get a business model and get creative.
I don’t think it’s over for Totlol
“Ian did not say what the problem was flat out, but to get real revenue he has to have appropriately licensed content.”
1. I think the problem he doesn’t refer to is that he can’t run pre-roll or post-roll ads like he could if he owned a license. YouTube’s TOS don’t let you run ads on top of their videos.
2. Separate from that, has any site made money repackaging and curating other people’s videos? I’m not saying it can’t be done. I just want an example.
videosift.com
The best plan he’s had is to say he’s closing down.
Caused great exposure
Now watch the proposals flow it
Great site – great plan
I’d buy it
…
I think he will not close. The site is very nice. And for sure people will like it. Any baby products company can advertise. He has to run ads. Thats all. He is not closing.
most advertising is done through agencies not the companies themselves…they do not take direct buys. So, they are calling on an agency (if they can find the person to talk to) and competiting against all the others in their category? how do you think it is this simple?
Also, parents hate ads running on sites with kids content…if they can avoid that site, they will.
Also, parents hate ads running on sites with kids content…if they can avoid that site, they will.
some VC give that guy a call.. or some angel investor… I mean 150k come’on guy. Or get some grants or non profits.. that want to promote non violence.. or how about all those pledge religious no sex organizations… PEOPLE OUT THERE Techcrunch, Mike, can you make a few phone calls…
Think about the publicity and positive Karma you’d get…
This is the typical case of an engineer running a business. Great execution, no business sense.
Sales isn’t an absolute. There’s a savvyness to it that a lot of people just do not have. That’s why you need marketing and sales on your team. There is NO SUCH THING AS A SELF MADE MILLIONAIRE. It always takes more than one person. Sounds like he’s throwing in the towel with damn near a working proof of concept.
I think a site for kids amateur videos is somewhat limited. Also, I don’t think that it helps that it is based on Youtube’s API. He should have people upload videos directly to the site. Yes, that would cost a lot more, but I think a VC would like that it isn’t dependent on Youtube’s API and terms of service.
Probably a better idea than this would be to replicate Hulu with more professional content for kids. Imagine Nickelodeon, Disney etc. getting together to do that. I doubt it will happen, but it would be popular.
With youtube hosting all the content, you do not have to worry about copyright legalities. That in itself would be a huge reason not to do that.. especially if you don’t have a legal department on hand.
Robin,
Can’t you get the owner of this site on the phone for a few Questions & Answers. We’d like to know if he’s just crying out for help, if he’s serious about just closing down, if he’s selling the url , etc.
The site has 150 000 visitors a month, and it cannot make any money?
I always read about a bunch of site going in to the deadpool and can understand the reasoning behind the fall. This is not one of those sites. There has got to be a better way to monetize a site such as this…
Does the statistical analysis of compete.com work? because it says that the site only pulls in 24,262 people each month. I cant even decipher the graph on alexa.com
I offered him $300k let see what happens
whoa. it was take 20 years to earn that back, if ever.
Have you lost the plot ? $300k for a site with crap traffic and website you could build in a few days and thats being generous………i got plenty of sites you can have with 10 or 20 times more traffic….this site is worth 2-3K max………
Why doesn’t he turn it into a non-profit? Worked for Wikipedia.
A parental Sympathy
It seems like a total waste for him to shut his site down, so I would be interested in buying it instead. The content is a good fit to add to my Virtual Pets site for kids at Adoptme.com. I currently own over 200 websites and have bought and sold over 100 websites in the past 5 years. I filled out the Contact Us form on the TotLol website now about it.
What would it cost to keep it going? Seems he is giving up too fast.
I don’t see why it requires one to sign up to view videos. That should only happen if the user wants to customize their experience (build a list of favorite vids, make friends, get their own vids from YouTube, etc).
To force a signup just to view the very first video surely turns away a lot of potential users.
As for advertising, I think the person that said $375/month was about right. You need a lot of traffic (or a great sales team) to make money off ads.
This seems like a really hot space with the recent launch of ZuiTube (http://video.kidzui.com/) by Kidzui. That said, my favorite kids video site remains Kideos (http://kideos.com/).