Website: www.fastmachines.com

Interview With: Josh Katinger

What made you start Fast Machines?

A general interest in the web and doing some blogging crossed with a real passion for motorsports of all types.

What is your background?

Web development, Internet marketing

Do you blog for fun or are you trying to make it a career? What is your goal with this blog?

Mostly for fun, can’t figure a way to monetize this thing without turning it into a massive advertising portal. Hard to stay true to a vision and monetize at the same time. I’d love to make money with the site, but right now we don’t. All the profits are turned around and reinvested in the site.

What was your tipping point? What put you on the map?

We really took off when our search rankings in Google caught on and especially when our RSS feed got added to MyYahoo!’s default listing of motorsports content.

What type of blogging software do you use?

Currently running MovableType, looking to move to Wordpress (both hosted on our server).

What ad network(s) do you use?

Adsense and Adsense only. Tried Yahoo…not as lucrative.

How much money do you make off your site monthly?

-$200 (yes that’s a negative sign…I lose money on this puppy…a labor of love I think they call it)

Any bold predictions for the future of sports on the internet?

Make sure you visit FastMachines.com in 2025 when we debut our online racing service where you will be able to control real live racing drivers actions from your hand held device.

STN’s Take:

For those of you that are motor sports fans, Fast Machines is a must visit. Josh has done a solid job of bringing a mix of writers together to provide some great content. Its fascinating that they were able to become the default blog for motor sports on the MyYahoo page. Any blogger in any sport would probably give up his right arm for that.

Losing 200 dollars a month is pretty tough though. With all the page views they get, they should be able to monetize their site better. Though Josh may pay his bloggers so that may eat into any revenue. Here are some of our suggestions to increase revenues:

• Create a side bar on the front page and put Google Ads in the upper left.
• On the blog post pages we are not a very big fan of the Ads right next to his logo (may confuse first time readers) so we would like to see the ads above the logo or below the logo and above the blog title blended in.
• A Google Ad at the end of his blog post above the Amazon ad.
• Categorize the articles within the blog post instead of categorizing them in the upper left. That would be another great spot for ads.
• Put Google Ads within his forum conversations. If the forum has the option, ask people to donate a certain amount of money to have the ads turned off.
• Research some different CPM networks for the less prominent positions to work in with his Google Ads

Josh talked about not wanting to turn into a big advertising network so these suggestions may be all for not. We don’t think his readers would mind having a few more ads show up on the site to guarantee Josh continues to provide quality content and doesn’t get tired of losing money on the site.