I'll start this year's review with the business stuff, since there's less to think about there.
A year ago, I was kind of dancing around the issue in front of me: My CoasterBuzz audience was disappearing. This trend actually started shortly before I relaunched the site in September 2008. That relaunch didn't fundamentally change the site beyond dropping the site database, which was full of dead links anyway as individual sites had really been disappearing for years, but it did provide an infrastructure that would allow me to alter it and improve it on a more regular basis.
But I never really did. When I got laid-off again after the honeymoon in April, I took a really hard look at the stats and realized that there was a disaster in motion, and I really needed to do something about it. There was no big bang idea that I had, but rather a series of things that would turn it around. I was fairly inspired after the Mix conference in Vegas too, so I tried to embrace what I was learning.
The obvious thing to do was to keep engaging the audience with newsletters, which I think helped traffic, but also really boosted club membership. It was up almost a third by the time the year was done. I also increased the price, which was something that was long overdue, and the reaction was surprisingly non-negative.
As for the tech on the site, some changes were minor, others were bigger. On the minor side, I enabled a way to associate trip reports in the forum with the park database records. The links back and forth between forum topic and database really helped people look around more. I also created a forum that allowed for uploading photos, the "day in pictures" forum, and it created a lot of traffic even if it hasn't been widely used in terms of contribution. The feed has been a pretty big success, as far as I can tell. I don't have a lot of instrumentation around measuring how often it has been downloaded, I can only tell that it gets a lot of action.
By summer, things really started to turn around. The visitor count slowly came back, but the page view count went way, way up. By fall, both numbers were up over 2008 on a same-month basis. The year ended with total pages up, but visitors still slightly down because of the weak start to the year. Overall, I'm extremely satisfied.
What I did not expect was that advertising would really start to come back starting in the fall. I don't know if this could be an economic indicator, but what a turn around from a year ago. On a per page basis, I did pretty well, but the decline in traffic in the early part of the year pretty much made it a flat, no growth situation for the year. With such a strong November and December, the lowest traffic months, that implies a really positive future.
PointBuzz was pretty much exactly the same as the previous year. Traffic there is pretty simple to predict. When Cedar Point builds something new, we get slammed. It'll be interesting to see if a water ride will generate the kind of interest that a new coaster would.
Strictly from a financial view, meeting the same bottom line as last year is something of a miracle. As expected, I replaced my laptop, but then I ended the year by selling my Mac Pro and buying the 27" iMac, which fortunately only required a net $400 to buy. It's crazy to think that a computer can rock it for three years now, compared to the old days where you'd be perpetually upgrading. It's also crazy that I could get so money for a used computer.
I also bought the Canon 7D, and it has completely changed the way I look at video, because I look at it now more like film. All of the video stuff certainly adds flavor to the sites, but it's not really a source of increased revenue really. And that's OK.
My 2010 goals include making MouseZoom a reality. Beyond that, maintaining the status quo is fine since I have no idea what impact the new lad will have. I think I'll be able to keep big purchases under control, though accessorizing the 7D for video I'm sure will happen. I also need to get the business back out of debt, since most everything I made was going toward paying my mortgage instead of expenses last year.
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