MyColts.Net surprises so far

We expected our new social networking site would drive lots of page views, and it has.

Here’s a snapshot of our page views over our first 4 weeks:

And here’s another gratuitous kid photo (from my personalized “dashoard” inside mycolts).

Anyway, we anticipated that users’ time on the site would be higher than colts.com, and it is. (15 minutes on mycolts versu 5 minutes for colts.com)

But we didn’t predict things like:

1. MyColts.net users seem to prefer Yahoo! search over Google search. This is the opposite of Colts.com users

2. MyColts.net users are using our blogging and survey tools quite a bit, but they’re using them more like forums. That is, they tend to have ongoing discussion threads inside blogs (in particular) that look a lot like forum conversations.

3. Speaking of forums, our forum traffic is not as centralized as it used to be. Fans are creating private forums. They’re even creating small groups within mycolts.net and inviting their friends from other bulletin boards to post inside the mycolts forum. It’s hard to explain, buy I love it!

4. Site moderation is more time consuming that we expected it to be. We didn’t have good enough administrative tools built for our moderators. That’s one of the first things we’re going to change in V2.0

We’re learning so much new stuff every day, we could almost open our own social net. Hey, wait a minute, we already did!!

Got a nice write-up today from Internet Retailer. (Read it here)

Gotta get back to my learning now…stay tuned.