Well it all seemed like a great idea at the time.

Several months ago, for shits and giggles, I sent an email to the guy who owned Fart.com, asking if he’d please let me have the domain to do with as I pleased in exchange for 50% of whatever revenue that brings in. The current owners didn’t really have much there – just one of those keyword-catch-all pages designed to scrape ad network dollars from whatever traffic the domain happened to bring in. So I figured it was worth a shot. Fart.com – it’s a pretty valuable piece of Internet real estate, and I figured it deserved to look like it.

Surprise surprise, after just one phone call, they said yes. The next day, they made the appropriate DNS changes, and I suddenly found myself in control of Fart.com. I will admit to being overcome by a quick burst of power here.

I quickly posted a landing page with a mailing list sign-up, and started tracking the traffic. It was not as high as you might thing. The site, without any marketing, brought in about 300 visitors each day. I had been expecting that there would be thousands of people each minute curiously typing Fart.com into their browser. Nope. Only about 300 per day. But the mailing list grew slowly, and by the time I was ready to launch an actual site a couple of weeks later, there were about 100 people signed up to receive more information.

Site #1 was a little ambitious. I wanted to take the capital of potty humor (Fart.com) and turn it into a bastion of intellectual discourse on the rear-arts. I enlisted a large group of humorists and writers and had them write smart fart or poop-based essays. Also, there was a big red button you could click, and it would make a fart noise.

I’m sure you can imagine which feature drew the most visitors.

Even with fresh content, updated daily, the site refused to pull in more than its default 300 daily visitors. I had lined the page with affiliate banners for buying things like fart machines, stink spray, and the like – but drew no sales. The effort of keeping up with daily posts began to wear on me, and the once-enthusiastic writers began to dry up… so after only a few weeks, the site grew stagnant.

Site #2 was a bit easier to maintain. A long time ago I had experimented with a site called FartURL.com – a URL shortening service, similar to TinyURL.com, or Bit.Ly. It turned long URLs into Twitter-sized micro-links. The difference, of course, was that I threw in an intermediary page that played a fart noise. I copied the service over to Fart.com, thinking it’d be a big hit – but it wasn’t. Again, the traffic leveled off at about 300 visitors per day, and the revenue was lacking.

So I threw in the towel. Just last week I told the Fart.com owners that they could have their domain back. I had a great idea for site #3, but it’s such an ambitious project I doubt I could ever get it built in a reasonable amount of time. It’s a service like FourSquare, or Twitter – The Fart Cloud, if you will… where users log each of their farts using the web site or a mobile app. The site would display a map of the world with little farts appearing in real time all across the globe.

It’s a service that the world needs. And if build properly, it could change the entire fart-o-sphere. So I offer this project up to anyone who’s reading. If you turn it into a million bucks, just spend a few of those bucks on one of these.