Photics.com has been around for over a decade. In that time, some ideas were met with great success. Others were not so popular. I realized that I stopped looking at the web data. That’s not because Photics.com is unpopular. Actually, there were over 218,000 visits in March 2009. A lot of eyeballs are looking at this website. But what content works and what doesn’t? I’m thinking that I should be looking at this data on a monthly basis, in order to make better site management decisions. Here’s the first report…
Hits Total Hits....................792,053 Visitor Hits..................726,436 Spider Hits....................65,617 Average Hits per Day...........24,751 Average Hits per Visitor...........22 Cached Requests................15,674 Failed Requests................69,397
Page Views Total Page Views..............519,600 Average Page Views per Day.....16,237 Average Page Views per Visitor.....16
Visitors Total Visitors.................32,596 Average Visitors per Day........1,018 Total Unique IPs................7,847
Bandwidth Total Bandwidth.................11.18 GB Visitor Bandwidth................8.01 GB Spider Bandwidth.................3.17 GB Average Bandwidth per Day......357.73 MB Average Bandwidth per Hit.......14.80 KB Average Bandwidth per Visitor..257.52 KB
Traffic is significantly down from the March highs. This is related to the Google AdSense issue. With new advertisers, and recently relaunched mobile aps, the website is starting to recover. However, I believe that this direction is not the best of strategies, as it makes Photics.com too reliant on mobile traffic.
This creates the Google paradox. I don’t like them as much as I used to, but Google is a huge source of traffic. If I can’t trust Google, I shouldn’t be focusing my website around their systems. Meanwhile, my interest in Guild Wars has been increasing. Some fansite related traffic has been hitting the website, as shown in the top referrers report.
- No Referrer (29,470)
- http://wiki.guildwars.com (507)
- http://www.photics.com (200)
- http://images.google.com (166)
- http://www.guildwars.com (96)
- http://digg.com (76)
- http://www.guildwarsguru.com (52)
- http://noobgibs.com (42)
- http://www.cyrket.com (30)
- http://images.google.co.uk (19)
507 visits from the Guild Wars Wiki, and 96 visitors from the main Guild Wars website, is not an impressive amount of web traffic. However, I haven’t been doing much. It’s a quiet time for Guild Wars. Yet, I know that I shouldn’t be resting. Guild Wars 2 is coming and it’s my mulligan from ArenaNet. There were some things that I could have done better when Guild Wars first launched. The chatter on Guild Wars Guru reminded me of that fact.
That’s when I remembered that I’ve been meaning to open up the Photics.com website to more contributors. Yet, I wasn’t sure how to do it. This website is essentially my blog. How could I clearly separate my content, but still allow contributors to participate too? My Guild Wars magazine is the perfect way to do just that. It can have a community feel, but separate from my other articles. I also have new software, so I could do a better job on the design too.
So far, running monthly reports was an excellent idea. 
Congratulations on getting referenced on the first page of comments! Even if it wasn’t the best kind of publicity, people somewhat remember you.
I think its time for a comeback!