Year End Statistics

This blog and CTHREEPO.com in general are getting fewer and fewer hits. Most hits are on the cliche page and the black hole extensions. The blog itself gets 1/5 the hits it was getting this time last year. The RSS feeds still gets 250 hits a day, but I have decided that this is mainly aggregators and robots. Feedburner shows a steady 10 or so real rss customers.

Justine says that this is because I don’t have enough cat pictures and too many tech articles and/or rants. I should concentrate on the cats and folksy news and I will be more popular. Nobody likes the technical stuff and nobody cares for my off the wall opinions. Well that’s not so easy for me. I write what I feel is important at the moment. Many of the the things that I think about can’t be discussed with the people at work or with the poker boys. Erica is sympathetic, but I doubt if she cares that my page views per unique visit changed in October.

The traffic in general on my sites is going up steadily. There have been shifts. Google changed its algorithms in September and my HarpAmps site dropped by half, but the other harmonica sites took up the slack and even HarpAmps is slowly coming back.

The total traffic for all sites was about 4 million page views last year. I am currently receiving about 500,000 page views a month or about 16,000 page views a day, but this will die down in January. The blog is only a few hundred of these viewers, but I care more about the blog than the other sites.

The surprises are that Paperthetown started getting hits out of the blue and HarpTab has been getting a huge number of mysterious hits from some spammy toolbar. These mysterious hits don’t result in income, though.

FreeNameAStar did very well and paid for all of my Christmas Shopping, bought me an 1963 vintage amplifier, and will pay for my Astronomy course this spring. I was averaging 25 pay stars a day up until Christmas, but this has died down to nothing again. I made more than 10 times what I made last year on stars. I credit this to the site redesign. I didn’t think that a change in web site design could make such a big difference in profits.

The Baseball Magic numbers were disappointing. I made about the same this year as last year in total. All I need is to have the sites appear in some magazine or mentioned on TV and they will take off.

Adsense has not increased this year over last year and has actually dropped by 20% in the last 4 months. I was going to use adsense to retire on, but I guess I have to keep working.

The Amazon money is mostly through beta context clicks. The Chitika pays very little but I have had it at the bottom of every page since August. Commission Junction is largely the income from clicks on eBay searches. Coast2Coast is a harmonica company, but I have to take the payment in harmonicas. Since I don’t play much anymore, I haven’t used this credit.

If there is a recession in 2008, I expect that all of this will go down. I think that the growth rate in internet traffic is starting to level off and the exponential changes I’ve seen in the past ten years will be more linear.

I am still waiting for the next big thing. There will be a web killer app soon. This will be a new paradigm that will change the way people use the web. I was looking at Justine’s iPhone and thinking that this will part of it. The death of broadcast TV and CDs will be coming soon to be placed with Video on Demand (think youtube) and digital media (think mp3s). All of my sites are primarily text based. I’ve tried audio and video, but it takes way more time.

It’s time to think about new year’s resolutions. I’ll have to look at the last few years resolutions to see what I wanted to do and failed to do. I think I may have blogged some of them.

Get your resolutions ready.