TuneChecker Ltd
This website is operated by Tunechecker.com Limited, a company wholly owned by Martin Lewis
In other words, it’s a separate company from MoneySavingExpert.com, even though it’s developed and maintained by MSE. In fact, it’s technically my first new website in seven years (when I set MSE up) and I see it as a major venture.
So I thought it was worth briefly jotting down why I chose to do it that way.
It’ll help it not get lost within MSE
Recently we’ve started separating off some of our bigger tools and giving them their own site URL. We’ve done this because MSE is now so big (according to Alexa it’s the UK’s 54th biggest site) that when people talk about a tool – they often say things like “go to MoneySavingExpert for the call checker” – and go to the site to find it it’s not instantly apparent.
So by giving the tools their own URLs people are less likely to get lost. We now have mobilevaluer.com, megashopbot.com, and travelmoneymax.com amongst others. Yet even though they have separate URLs, technically they are MoneySavingExpert.com tools, unlike the TuneChecker.
- TuneChecker may have ads on it at some stage
I may need to put advertising on the TuneChecker at some point. The site cost a lot of money to develop and its only revenue is income from affiliate links to the download providers. Yet the amount of tracks people would need to buy to just cover the initial costs is huge and could take years. And as I want to develop it and even assign it its own team, it may have to generate more revenue.
One option would be to have a section called “what they want you to listen to” and allow record labels to pay for their artists to be listed in that space. This would then have links to search for where that track is cheapest. That seems a decent compromise to me. But it’s not something I would want to do with MSE, so I want to keep it separate.
- TuneChecker may be white-labelled.
For similar reasons as for advertising we may look at white-labelling the TuneChecker, which means allowing other sites to use the technology and make it look like their own.
Again this is something I don’t do with MSE, you have to come to this site to get the info, and no one can manipulate it for their own needs. Yet I’m less worried about that for the TuneChecker due to the nature of its content.
- TuneChecker may go international.
If it proves to work well, the technology is quite portable, so I’m tempted to try and develop this internationally, operating for a number of countries, something I don’t think is do-able with MSE (not without enormous resource).
I hope this makes sense and would love to hear other ideas people have for it.
