My First Blog Post - December 24, 2007

Welcome to my first blog post -- ever.

After responding to this thread //www.wallstreetoasis.com/node/11787 about how much revenue the site pulled in, I figured some of you might find a regular blog on the happenings of the site interesting. At the very least it will provide me a therapeutic outlet as I work through my last 6 months in private equity, run the site and try to prepare for business school next summer (just heard from Wharton this past Thursday).

Taking a lead from John Chow, I will be experimenting with different sources of advertising to figure out what is the best way to monetize the site …and I plan to blog about successes and failures here. I figure it might be useful for other social networking sites like mine that are new to web development and advertising. One of my users was kind enough to point out that with the level of traffic the site generates, the fact that I only pull in around $1k a month is sad. (he was much nicer about it though).

To be honest, I am still relatively new to this game…I went to a liberal arts school and my buddy from MIT is the one that first helped me start iBankingOasis about 2 years ago (he has since been bought out so he could finish his phD in comp sci). So as you can imagine, my background in Drupal (the best content management system out there – drupal.org – and what WallStreetOasis.com runs on) is rather limited.

There are a lot of features and initiatives I have held off on because of the lack of revenue / resources…I will keep pushing forward because I still get a kick out of the interactions and threads going on every day in the forums -- i love seeing people get help and learning about new industries and I even anticipate myself using WallStreetOasis as resource in my own future career.

I would really appreciate any help spreading the word about the site to help the community grow if you find it useful…or even better, start your own blog on WallStreetOasis.com to let us hear your thoughts! If you are a registered user you can see a “My blog” link in your userbox (in upper left hand corner when you’re logged in). Like I’ve said before, I am confident we can make WallStreetOasis.com the most entertaining and useful finance community online.

Thank you all for your contributions and I look forward to blogging in the future about the site, life and random nothings. (please join me)

Stay Strong, Patrick

PS – in future posts I will be referring to a bunch of people I interact with … but I thought it would be appropriate to introduce my girlfriend: who we will call The Girlfriend (or The GF) for purposes of this blog and my dad – aka Big Daddy (who is an investor in the site and listens to my random crap / musings about 2 to 3 times a day).

PPS - right now we have about 5,000 visits a day, but a lot of these monkeys are anonymous. We should be hitting the 10,000 registered user mark before the New Year! (we're at 9,899) I will let you know if we get there before the clock strikes midnight because it is coming down to the wire.