Some wonderful, talented people are behind Wowio. It’s one more reason why I’m sorry to see traffic on the decline, following the controversial changes in the ad-supported site. In fact, Wowio is now actually a bit of a bookstore in disguise.
"I have influenced more then 1,000 people to stay away," one user writes in, "and I will continue to boycott." Verifiable or not, that statement shows the extent to which Wowio is in trouble. My biggest problems are with the obnoxious, intrusive ads, as well as charges for PDFs that were once free.
Granted, the Alexa traffic-tracker is imprecise, and you can’t confuse site popularity with profitability, but it’s clear that the reborn Wowio is far from a hit. If Wowio’s new owners can’t make a go of it, maybe they need to sell the site to a publisher, Amazon, Google or another company with enough resources to make the advertising model work in a user-friendly way.
Related: Wowio founder’s defense of the changes, my rebuttal and the latest on Wowio’s business difficulties.
alexa ranks have almost no correlation to revenue. I know of ebook sites that have far higher reach than ours but have 10% of our revenue. Our own reach has fallen at the same time that our revenue shot up 50% and sometimes rises during flat months.
I’m grateful I never experienced the original Wowio. One less thing I can be outraged about.
Agreed. I think there should be more push on the consumer side to try to get Wowio to at least go back to offering free PDFs.
So, if you like them so much, why not giving them a link in your article? That way you could support them a little, i guess…
i used to really like wowio, and i used to check it pretty regularly. but i haven’t been back since the change.