At the time, optimism was pumping hot air into an ever-expanding tech bubble. Then, the bubble burst and the Darts were forced back to the drawing board until late 2004, when the acronym that makes up the site’s domain was repositioned as “The Only Porn You Need.”
“It’s no secret that the biggest industry on the net is the adult industry,” Phil Dart told XBiz. “We developed the concept of leveraging www.topyn.com to tap into this market, using the fact that our domain is short and easy to remember.”
Today, Topyn has 730 sites in its database, with 80 sites having submitted link requests and awaiting evaluation to be added.
“We currently add approximately 40 sites per week,” Dart said. “Statistics from our website shows that we currently have around 1,000 hits per day, with 300 unique users accessing the site. The development of the portal and its content is still in its early stages, with many changes and ideas currently underway.”
Dart, who acts as content manager, said he and his brother Steven, the sites operations director, make significant changes to the site every two weeks or so based on user feedback. The goal is to become a destination site for porn surfers.
“General search engines no longer meet the expectations of adult content consumers,” Dart said. “They are much less effective due to [surfers] being sent from site to site to site before actually finding the content they are looking for.”
Dart said his research showed that surfers are particularly frustrated by broken links and site dead-ends.
“The added pain of navigating through sites with excessive pop-ups and exit consoles can make it an annoying and very time consuming process,” he said. “How we capitalise on this frustration is one of TOPYN’s most effective attributes — we partner with webmasters who offer a number of quality sites that we manually inspect and add to the database.”
While Dart said he prefers to add only sites with no pop-ups, he will make exceptions if the content is high quality or rare and tries to work with webmasters to accommodate them while keeping the site surfer friendly.
