WinCustomize - July 2001
Tuesday, July 31, 2001 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
So where did that traffic come from?1) Stardock: 68% (up from 63% las month)
2) DeskMod: 7% (down from 11% from last month)
3) DeviantArt: 2.8% (same as last month)
4) LotsOfSkins: 1.5% (down from 2%)
T-shirts are in manufacturing and should be available soon. That and the CDs should hopefully offset the costs of the site.
With CD sales, we were about $3,600 over budget for the month so we still need to find a way to generate an additional $3,600 per month to pay for the increased band width.
The only scarey thing is that if traffic were to increase this month, we'd max out the bandwidth.
We are probably going to have to institute steps to decrease bandwidth use fairly soon unless the shirts and CDs do pretty well. This will likely come in the form of limiting downloads for those who haven't created accounts to 5 megabytes (or even requiring accounts to download). The next step would be to require users who are downloading many megabytes of WB skins or icon packages and Desktopx themes to at least be registered usres. I.e. if you've downloaded 20 MEGABYTES of WindowBlinds skins but you haven't registered WindowBlinds or bought Object Desktop, that's obviously a bad thing.
We don't expect anything significant to happen in August, we actually expect traffic to decline as August is one of the slowest months of the year due to vacations and such so hopefully the T-shirts will make up the difference. We only have to sell 300 T-shirts per month (0.15% of the monthly uniques) to stay on budget (Stardock gives us a $5,000 grant per month to gaurantee that this site will always be here, but we're currently spending $10,000 per month).
This month's new section is Convergence. It'll probably be the last new section we add for a bit (until bandwidth is under control).
We're very happy with how things are going though. Afterall, the only reason why bandwidth is even an issue is because the site has grown so much.
Attila
Reply #2 Thursday, August 2, 2001 11:40 AM
Reply #2 Thursday, August 2, 2001 11:40 AM
Ahhh yeah! DA pulling in the #3 spot in referrals. Go head with ya bad self. Oh well, atleast we've been consistant, baha 
Frogboy
Reply #3 Friday, August 3, 2001 1:48 PM
Reply #3 Friday, August 3, 2001 1:48 PM
One other interesting stat - in July we got 17,000 or so new accounts. Compared to something like 2700 in June.
Mezlaq
Reply #4 Saturday, August 4, 2001 8:50 AM
Reply #4 Saturday, August 4, 2001 8:50 AM
I think most of us would agree that you should put some ads on your site, so you can use all of that traffic to get some more bandwidth. I don't think a couple of 468x60s would kill us...
Draginol
Reply #5 Saturday, August 4, 2001 3:19 PM
Reply #5 Saturday, August 4, 2001 3:19 PM
Ads don't pay squat. That's the problem. At $.20 per CPM, that's not going to remotely pay the bills and it just makes the site slower.
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Reply #1 Thursday, August 2, 2001 11:31 AM