Now that the year is nearly over, I can start to asses how the Web sites did this year. Generally speaking, not as well as I hoped.
Traffic overall was down, which is not at all surprising to me. CoasterBuzz was getting stale in appearance and the industry just doesn't capture the imagination the way it used to. Similarly, Cedar Point didn't build anything, so naturally PointBuzz saw somewhat of a slide too.
The big surprise though is that club membership was only slightly down. I expected it to be totally proportional to the traffic, but it wasn't even close. That sends the signal that the most dedicated part of the audience is, well, dedicated, and I need to listen more to them. Also surprising is that ad revenue was down, but not proportional to the traffic. On a per-page and per-visit basis, it was paying out higher than last year. And the biggest kicker? Reducing the pop-ups to once a day for CoasterBuzz (unless you use IE ;)) did not adversely affect overall ad revenue.
The silver lining in all of this is that the redesigns for both sites helped. PointBuzz got its overhaul late last year, and the simpler-is-better approach absolutely showed people were viewing more pages and spending more time there. CoasterBuzz also benefited from the rebuild in September, with people spending more time there. Hard to do a true comparison in raw numbers, since November is always miserable compared to August, but the fact that the people who do visit are spending more time there is encouraging.
I really wish I could spend more time focusing on the sites. I enjoy the coding stuff when I can really dive in and give it my fullest attention. The business aspect turns me on too. And ultimately, I love that it serves as a connection point for so many people. And for almost nine years at that!
Now I wish I could devote more time to that next project. I swear that between the holidays and the new job, I might as well write off this month.
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