Case Study: Modest Opinions

As with all of the case studies involving projects that I attempted prior to 2010, what you’re about to read is the product of my memory, some notes that I’ve dug up, and some old website files that I kept in an archive. I hadn’t intended, at the time, to do a public case study on these projects, so please bear with me. Projects from 2010 onward are far more detailed.

Modest Opinions
( 2007 – 2008 )

Modest Opinions, modestopinions.com (I no longer own the domain), was a site originally called Gotta Be Kidding. I came up with the concept and registered gottabekidding.com (which I also no longer own), but decided, a day or two later, that I hated the URL. I thought about a replacement and came up with Modest Opinions with the tagline “You are all entitled to my Modest Opinions”. I think I had written one or two pieces, making it really easy to port the whole Gotta Be Kidding WordPress install over to the new location. I kept the design elements (few as they were) and changed the logo.

The premise was as simple as it was stupid: I would write Carlin-style rants about pop culture, idiocy, and things that bothered me (originally, all with the tagline, “you gotta be kidding” somewhere in them). I was already blogging here at Daniel M. Clark .com at that time, why the need for another site?

I didn’t want my mom to come to this blog and see the word fuck in the posts. Seriously. That’s what prompted me to create a separate site… I wanted to keep the profanity and topics I’d be writing about off this blog. Since then, profanity here is rare, but it does occasionally come up. There’s a time and a place for everything, and as long as the profanity is used properly, for effect and emphasis, and is grammatically correct, I’ll use it. Grammatically correct profanity. I’m such a visionary.

What worked

I felt a bit more free when I wrote for Modest Opinions, despite the fact that my name was still on it. Had I been using a pseudonym, maybe things would have been different. That’s about all that worked though.

What didn’t

It was just another site that needed upkeep, and I was spreading myself thin by the end of 2007. The site never found an audience, never received many comments (if any at all, I don’t honestly remember). There were a few banner ads, but that was it as far as monetization. The site was not optimized for search engines in the least – though I do remember it used the Revolution theme for WordPress, which was fairly well optimized out of the box.

Verdict

Modest Opinions never made a dime.

Before shuttering the site, I imported all the posts back here to Daniel M. Clark .com. If you venture back into the earliest posts on the site, you may find a couple that still reference Modest Opinions. Overall? I don’t consider this site a success in any way.