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sinak comments on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? - Less Wrong
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I think Micaiah_Chang mostly nailed this. I actually wrote a site that did this a few months ago. I had about 4000 users who had actually gone through a complete session.
As guessed, the problem is that I couldn't get people to start forming it as a habit. There is no immediate payback. Less than 20 people out of 4000 did more than one session.
This one is easily solved. The Anki decks have a (weak) rating system, and allowing people to import anki decks was easy.
Additionally, there are at least 18 competitors. Here's the list I made at the time. Very few seem to be successful.
I shut the site down about a month ago. There are numerous free competitors which don't have any great annoyances. I wouldn't suggest starting another of these sites unless you figured out an effective way to "gamify" it.
Persol, that list of competitors is massively helpful, thank you.
I'd love to hear more about your experiences, and to get a better of idea of exactly what you had built. I think what I have in mind is a more mass-audience version of SRS (see my response to Micaiah above) rather than a more traditional Anki-type system.
I'd love to know how you were monetizing the service, and if there are any screenshots of what the site looked like. Did you offer a mobile application? Did you try to push people to engage via push notifications at all? I think this is definitely a core part of a strategy that I'd push for. I think "gamifying" is also an interesting route, need to think about this angle a little more carefully though.
Here's the actual PHP code, weighing in at 18Mb. It's probably the best way to get a feel for what it was, and it might help you decide what to do.
It includes:
* This version may not have the correct repetition calculation. Due to the inherent time factor, it was a hassle to test, so I didn't fix that part of the code until later. *
It was admittedly an ugly (but fast loading) site. After a few weeks of cheap banner ads and seeing the minimal reuse, I just set it to coast until the year ran out.
I did do some A/B testing with email notifications about a month in. It didn't have a measurable effect of return use.
Monetization was via banner ads. Via A/B testing, the best location for the ad was under the card's question. Once flipping the card, the ad was hidden. I also deactivated the ads for awhile too see if they were too intrusive; return visitors didn't improve.
I also incorporated graphics and audio, since the most successful SRS systems seem to revolve around vocabulary. I personally used it to help learn basic Mandarin for use with my in-laws... but it is a boring way of learning a language. While it is much more effective than Rosetta Stone, it is very difficult to stay engaged.
This is great - I'm going to take a look through the code and see if I can get it running on a test server.