Is It Time To Kill Marktd?

We launched Marktd, our ‘marketing news by marketers for marketers’ site, about a year ago. It’s built on a Digg like system where stories get voted on and the popular ones rise to the top.

The site now has 4,200 user submitted links on all aspects of marketing and advertising. And traffic is ok. But we’re thinking about killing it because:

* In the real world, people don’t seem to be compelled by the status of being top ‘Digger’. Maybe it’s something about already having perceived real world status.

* It’s not useful enough. Jack Cheng and I spent some time trying to make it more of a bookmark site by rebuilding the site in Ruby – a site where articles are ranked on how many other people have bookmarked an article rather than voted for it. But we realized we didn’t have the skills or time to build a system.

* The system is getting spammed by battery resellers in China and played by Google Rank consultants. There’s too much crap being submitted these days.

* We’ll say this publicly: Federated Media do a crap job at selling ads on the PSFK network. So no cash, no hiring of someone full time to edit the site. FM tell us that they still have to educate the market, we just don’t know an alternative to take our business to.

Would love to hear your thoughts on what we should do – in the comments section.