[nass]

My experience is that the conversion rate is very low when trying to reach out beyond the traditional community sites. Matt, your stats indicate about 19% at the first barrier, fyi the same calculation at the gets about a 30% conversion. Where were those banners run though? Your conversion ratio will always depend on the community you're advertising to.

Anyhow 30% is all well and good, but you're spot on, the huge dropoff happens in the first minute of actually playing - when they discover it's text, when the text whizzes by impossibly fast etc. I completely blame ourselves, we could be so much better at anticipating what problems new users are likely to have and doing something about it. Imo, a which splits the various outputs into several boxes would be the answer, something along these lines or better which Flash and I wanted to develop 5 years ago at wotmud but never had a chance to.

I also understand from some thread I saw elsewhere that you're also in the midst of developing a MUD based on a specific book theme/author. You'll find that helps because there's a base of people who are already interested in that world. There are certain things you should do now to maximise your return from that in a year's time though.

... my request to all you commercial guys would be this. If you could give some GUI based on the standard MUD applet that any MUD could hook up with some minimal config back to the mudding community without strings attached that'd be great. You're all developing these in some shape or form, and whilst it gives you a competitive edge, if the community as a whole doesn't do something to help itself it'll be in deep doodoos sooner or later.

Matt, you're talking a lot of sense in this thread about what works and what doesn't, and although we'll always have our differences because you're commercial, everyone who runs a MUD should be paying attention to this thread. Especially the fact that the data is based on stats rather than gut feeling. What we have are the benefits of analytics and data tracking; I'm also an analytics and data tracking weenie. I'd recommend anyone that doesn't to get interested in this subject and use it to work out how to prioritise your resources (which in the case of us free guys, is time and effort).