Online for a Year

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Roughly a year ago this website was opened. By opened, I mean first indexed by Google and Yahoo; the web-space and domain name were registered a year and a month ago (the start of June 2008). It took about a month to get this website to the point that it was ready to receive visitors. At that point, I registered a Google Webmasters account, added this website to the list, and started creating external links.

One of the reasons for creating this website was simply to find out how it all works. In particular, I was curious as to what level of traffic a newcomer's website would actually obtain, and how much effort was required. There are plenty of claims on various websites that one could get rich quick by doing the following:

• Pick a "niche" topic,
• Slap together a website,
• Put Google AdSense and/or other advertisements, and
• Watch the traffic and watch the dollars roll in.

Pure fiction of course; building anything takes time and effort. No-where could I find solid details on website visitor numbers and advertising revenues, so the only way to find out was to create a real website, and record its performance This is why this blog has monthly reviews/statistics posted; they provide a profile of the first year of a personal website's existence. Unfortunately my Google AdSense was disabled for invalid click activity (which I still do not know who was responsible for), so those results are unavailable. However, the total would not have been more than tens of dollars anyway, as the number of page-views has been far below the hundreds of thousands of views required.

So, how did this website perform? The monthly visits, unique visitors and page views are shown below. The number of visitors quickly rose up to about 1500 in October 2008, when I first announced the RadeonHD for Amiga OS 4.x project. From October onwards the number of visitors dropped off a little, and then rose back to the 1500 level. Most likely there are around 1000 - 1500 people who are interested in my Amiga projects, ignoring the additional visitors who come looking for various things via Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Thus, this website's visitor levels have probably already hit the boundary of the Amiga "niche." The increase in page-views in the last month was caused by the introduction of the forums, and the opening of the RadeonHD driver beta testing program.

Another thing that I was curious about was visitor locations over time. Each monthly review contained a snap-shot of the ClustrMap for that month. These have been collected into an animation (below), showing a record of visitor locations over a year. This animation gives a vague idea of how the animated visitor website location map concept that I posted on the "Free Ideas" page might look.

So there you have it: a profile of visits to a personal website in it's first year for the curious, or the bored. With this complete, I am going to stop posting the monthly statistics. This "experiment" was all about the first year of operation (and creating the animation above), which is now complete.

Comments (0) | 4 July 2009