Growth Hacking
In 2013, I helped take Dormstormer.com from <1,000 users to 2.5 million monthly active users in under 6 months. At its peak, we sold the property to a media holding company. The following is how we did it.
Dormstormer.com was like a buzzfeed meets college humor website, full of listicles, and short viral content.
The content was innately shareable, however, Dormstormer had little platform to distribute its content from.
Stumbleupon, content syndication, SEO, and other methods for content distribution helped but we had a key issue with attracting a large audience.
After studying every nuance of Buzzfeed’s growth strategy, we realized we needed to find an ally who shared a related problem.
We knew our content could stand on its two feet…
The classic adage, “Content is King” is no truer than in the social media sphere. Many major Facebook properties had a content problem. They acquired massive audiences when Facebook was learning about its business model. Some of these pages had tens of millions of followers but were monetizing through spammy content and received pennies from Adsense. We realized there was an arbitrage opportunity where we provided Facebook pages with proper editorial content, sold our ad inventory directly to brands to drive the CPM rate up, and created a rev share agreement with a major Facebook page to guarantee distribution to Dormstormer.com. After reaching out to 1,000’s of Facebook pages (and getting my personal profile temporarily banned), I was able to secure a partner that could seed the distribution.
I was then able to lock in advertising relationships with Demand Media, Woven Media, Billabong, Catch Surf, Sol Republic Headphones, and more to purchase our display inventory directly. We were able to scale this model up to 2.5 million users and guarantee a minimum level of ad spend. Rather than deciding to double down on the growth of Dormstormer and invest deeper into the project, we decided to sell to one of the major media holding companies and pursue a new kind of media, short social video.
