Sitehoppin’ is the brain child of Zedomax. Max is pretty good at spotting trends and jumping on them. When he saw how the Million Dollar Wiki took off, he went and started the One Buck Wiki, the Five Buck Wiki and the Quarter Wiki. When he saw how big Digg got, he went and started Wagg It. Now Max is back with his newest venture, Site Hoppin’, which is the subject for this review.
What Is SiteHoppin’?
SiteHoppin’ takes its name from bar hoppin’ and is like a cross between the Million Dollar Wiki, Stumble Upon and EntreCard. SiteHoppin’ allows users to submit their own sites, discover other sites, earn beer credits and buy and sell Beer Stocks.
The easiest way to experience all this is to sign up for an account. Only registered users may submit their sites to the SiteHoppin’ database. In addition to submitting your site, you’re free to recommend any site you find interesting (like Stumble Upon).
To hop from site to site, you just press the SiteHoppin’ button on the upper left hand corner. Every time you press the button, you hop to a new site and earn one Beer Credit. If you rate the site you hopped to, you’ll earn 5 Beer Credits. Other ways to earn credits includes:
- Tagging or Comments using our “Tag” function = 20 Beer Credits
- New Site Submission = 30 Beer Credits
- Click from your site to SiteHoppin through the Beer Widgets = 50 Beer Credits
Every 10 Beer Credits gives you one hop to your site. Build a million credits, get 100,000 visitors. That’s how it should work anyway. However, SiteHoppin’ has a major flaw in its credit system. Users are allowed to put the hops on auto surf by clicking the Slideshow Mode button. This mode is suppose to let you surf the internet like an iPod but it can be used as a cheat – engage Slideshow Mode, go to bed, walk up in the morning to thousands of Beer Credits. If the Slideshow Mode gets abused too much, traffic quality will suffer tremendously.
SiteHoppin’ Beer Stocks
SiteHoppin Beer Stocks are essentially web pages that allow you to buy into a “shared percentage” of the site’s total web traffic. When you buy Beer Stocks, you become co-owners of shared web traffic received by SiteHoppin.com. In addition, Beer Stock owners can participate in a two-tier Beer Stock Affiliate Program.
The Beer Stocks are paid Wiki pages. Stock prices are $1 per consonant and $10 per vowel. So, the page for Brew cost $13. You can monetize the page anyway you like. You can even embed your own site into the page, like the owner of Blog did.
Benefits of Beer Stocks
Beer Stocks has several benefit over earning free Beer Credits. Beer Stock pages received a reserved 33% of all SiteHoppin’ traffic. For example, if the site gets 100,000 views per day and there’s 100 Beer Stock pages, each page gets 100,000 / 3 / 100 = 333 views per day. At the time of this review, there are less than 50 outstanding stocks.
Stocks can be resold on the Beer Stock Market. The Beer Stock Market is for private sales of Beer Stock owners. No commission is taken by SiteHoppin’. The current highest asking price for a stock is $500, for the “Business” keyword.
Two-Tier Affiliate Program
Beer Stock owners are automatically enrolled into SiteHoppin’ two-tier affiliate program. Beer Stock owners can offer new customers 25% discounted with their affiliate link. If the customer makes a purchase, the affiliate receive 25% commission. This setup makes it cheaper for someone to buy Beer Stocks from an existing affiliate than to buy direct from SiteHoppin’. You earn 15% of all net profit on the Beer Stocks when your affiliates sell Beer Stocks through their affiliate link.
This two-tier structure has allowed SiteHoppin’ to expand quite quickly. At this moment, a check of the site shows 59 members and 2,256 guests online. Not bad for a Sunday weekend.
At the very least, SiteHoppin’ is another way to generate traffic to your blog. It’s free to join and have your site listed so I don’t see any reason not to sign up. My recommendation for SiteHoppin’ is to get rid of that Sideshow Mode. The potential for abuse is just too great.
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