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By
Ron Jackson
DevHub.com
(formerly known as EVO Landing) is a mass
development platform designed by the Seattle
based EVO Media Group. The company was co-founded
in the summer of 2007 by CEO Geoffrey Nuval (seen
in the top photo at right), CTO Daniel L. Rust
(middle photo)and Sr. VP for Strategic Marketing Mark
A. Michael (bottom photo).
Nuval, an honors graduate
from Stanford who also initiated a course in
Hi-Tech Entrepreneurship at Oxford's Said Business
School, told us "When we were introduced to the
parking and domain industry, we realized there was a remarkable
opportunity to provide a reusable set of features to
help the people in this industry develop out their
portfolio, which we launched as the EVO Landing platform
in December 2008. Over the course of EVO Landing,
over 3.5 million domains have been submitted and
close to 60,000 of them were developed out on the
system."
"While a lot of these
sites were very successful in attracting traffic beyond
just type-in, what we came to realize, however, was that
the need for original content and even the slightest
human touch is needed to take that site to the next
level, both for users who land on the site and for
search engines. This is when we decided to shift
gears in August of 2008 and start building DevHub."
Our interview with DevHub's
Co-Founders continues below:
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DN
Journal: Give us some details about your
specific program – how you attack the problem of
developing a large number of sites at an affordable
cost.
DevHub: On
February 17th, 2009 at we launched DevHub in public
beta. Whether a user is looking to build a network of 1
or 1,000 sites, the DevHub platform provides you with
the flexibility to publish, monitor, and manage useful
sites that make users money. It is completely free to
the user to bring over their domains or use an
available subdomain (nameofsite.devhub.com).
Using our integrated drag-and-drop editor, you
can easily create and publish full-fledged websites
using our text, image, blogging, and embed/widget
modules. Go a layer deeper by adding metatags and site
titles. Further enhance the look and feel of these sites
by changing the background, logo, site styles, and more.
While the platform itself uses some of the
integrations and business partnerships we had made
during EVO Landing, this is a completely different
platform built from the ground up to allow anyone
the keys to rapid, full-site development. Some
outside the industry have compared it to Squidoo
and Hubpages for its ease of use and ability to
monetize, while others have even compared it to a Joomla
or Drupal for its advanced, flexible content
management system capabilities.
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Screenshot
of DevHub's Home Page |
The platform itself
is a convergence of multiple API integrations
and high-end development tools that empowers the
Internet entrepreneur to build quality,
media-rich sites targeted at niche audiences.
DevHub takes care of the heavy lifting (hosting,
programming, integration of monetization
channels, and report aggregation) so you can
focus on building and enhancing your network.
By breaking down the technical barriers to
site development, DevHub looks to foster a
community and environment that reaches brand new
levels of commercial expression on the Internet.
The only true way to understand it, however,
is to give it a test drive, which only
takes 5 minutes and is completely free to become
a DevHead (what we call those in the
DevHub community). |
With DevHub you can easily publish a wide range of sites:
- Local
Service-based
- Trend-based
- Commerce /
Product-based
- Community-centered
- Media Rich
portals (i.e. Videos, Pictures, Podcasts)
- Vertically-focused
(i.e. Jobs, Travel, Education, etc)
- Blog-base
site
DN Journal:
While these sites are often referred to as mini-sites,
many of the current services allow domain owners to add
their own content and advertisers (or feeds) to further
the development process. To what degree does your system
allow this? Does your service allow a domain
owner, to plug in third party content from a source like
Tinbu
for example?
DevHub:
The DevHub platform was made to provide users to create more
than just mini-sites. Users can build sites
that are 1 page or 100 pages deep if they put a little
effort into it.
We continue to add to the feature
set and the modules every week, giving users a new set
of things to add to their site almost every time they
log in (we actually are launching our Tinbu integration
in the next week). With the flexibility of the
system, users can even plug in all their own codes,
feeds and we are even tied into Google’s
webmaster tools.
We try to keep it fun for our
DevHeads, providing newsletters on best practices or
once we launch major features/partnerships, and a
weekend update is sent out that features the best sites
created on the platform that week.
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DN
Journal: The #1 question on domain
owner’s minds will be, will this service make
more money for me than parking the same
domains? Since this is a new category, with many
of the service providers having been open less
than a year, there is not yet a long track
record for comparing results, but based on what
you currently know, how do you answer this
question from your customers?
DevHub:
With DevHub the potential to make more than
parking is there, and we’ve seen it.
People who have taken the time and effort (as
little as 5-10 minutes a day) to truly develop
out their sites on the DevHub platform have seen
significant increases in the their daily
traffic, which translates into major revenue
upside. With direct parking feeds dropping
so significantly in the past year, |
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| the ability to use
website advertising feeds (which haven’t
experienced that same drop), in addition to
other sources of monetization, is now even more
lucrative for the domain industry. |
DN Journal:
Many developers say there are additional benefits,
beyond immediate monetization, to moving beyond the
parking page. For example, more “curb appeal” for
potential buyers, less likelihood of inadvertent
trademark infringement (from ads served by the PPC
company), etc. What do you see as the added benefits of
following at least a minimal development strategy?
DevHub:
Domain holders have the greatest asset of all. We never
thought of our competition as the domain parking
industry but more of the 18 year old kid at home who
buys free-cat-health.info and is able to generate
$50 a month in organic traffic and affiliate
offers. Meanwhile a domain holder that owns CatHealth.com
is sitting on parked page maybe making a $1 a
month on PPC and hoping to sell it off.
Domain holders are in a VERY
good position to translate their assets into an
actual media network. Much like bloggers utilize Wordpress
to build their blog network, domain holders should seek
to utilize DevHub to build out their website network.
Take a look at our gallery at www.devhub.com/gallery
to see examples and the wide range of sites people can
create on DevHub.
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DN
Journal: Parking is a well
established industry with many major players.
Your service category is the new kid on the
block. How do you see the equilibrium between
these two sectors (parking and mini-site
development) changing over the next couple of
years – do they both hold their own, does the
balance of power shift, etc?
DevHub:
We are pretty sure the major players in the
parking industry are looking to move beyond
current solutions, especially as they continue
to be squeezed in margin by the major ad
providers. Rather than a shift, I can see
these guys partnering with development solutions
to bring their own brands beyond just the
parking space. We have been talking to
quite a few of these guys lately and it should
be interesting as the year progresses. |
DN Journal: Thank
you for filling us in on what is happening with DevHub.
Anything you wouild like to add before we go?
DevHub:
A couple of points…EVOLanding.com a is fully retired
system. DevHub.com is a completely new
platform that has been built from the ground up on
cutting edge technology and offers a solution even
beyond the domaining channel to anyone without the
technical skills or time, but has the desire to build a
monetizable website.
We encourage domainers now to
transition from the ‘what can you do for me’ to the
‘what can I do for myself’ mindset, as this will
help them out in the long run. And if you are in
that mindset now, then DevHub is the place for you.
Beyond its ease of use, it is the
flexibility of DevHub that has attracted over 3,000
users since our launch one month ago. If you
want to create a professional looking site that you can
lease to a real firm – DevHeads are doing that.
If you want to put in your own ad feeds / affiliate
deals or sell your own banner space and take 100%
of that revenue – DevHeads are doing that. If
you want to create a blog that has the products or
services you talk about right beside that entry –
DevHeads are doing that. The expression of
creativity and ingenuity on the DevHub system is really unlimited
and the DevHead community continues to amaze us with new
things to feature week after week. (see www.devhub.com/gallery
to see what we’re talking about)
Lastly, for the domainer community
specifically, we are working with a couple of design and
content development third-party services which will be
providing development on the DevHub platform for those
with very large portfolios that they cannot develop out
themselves – so look out for those services in the
next few weeks!
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Click
any of the links in this table to
learn about the mass website development
services provided by other companies
featured in this DN Journal Cover
Story. |
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