Growth

Howdy. March already.. how time flies, eh? Woke up, had a voicemail on my cell. Somebody who visited my blog and wanted to talk about advertising on my sites. Bleep. Deleted. Hehe. If you're reading this, just e-mail me or talk to me on MSN. I find too much dilly dallying goes on in live conversation. I can be much more blunt online :) Anyhow, seeing as it's the 1st of the month, I went and recalculated my monthly and daily averages. It was close... not a big improvement, but then again, you can't expect much when you're averaging from the past 6 months, and recalculating once a month; as you're only changing it by 1/6th of a factor during each recalcuation. Anyhow, I was luckily enough to be up $4 more a day, making it an average of $128 a day now from ads. Since it was such a close call, I decided to go and increase PFO's ad prices. I love doing this.. it's better than Christmas, it really is. Here are the changes I made: Sitewide 468x60 Banner (Top of Site): $350 -> $375 Sitewide 468x60 Banner (Top Middle of Site): $350 -> $375 Sitewide 125x125 Banner: $200 -> $250 Sitewide 120x60 Side Ad: $50 -> $60 Sitewide 120x600 Skyscraper Ad: $350 -> $375

There's been, as always, so much demand for the ads, that the price increase should be okay. Also, $375 for a million impressions (there's no rotation and they are on every page throughout the site) is only $0.375 CPM. Even with it being an ad heavy site and 4 top 468x60 banners, $0.375 CPM for a highly targeted poker site is a great deal, so I don't feel too bad.

Thanks to web.archive.org, we can easily compare how much the site has grown from exactly one year ago to this day:

One year ago

Today

Then:

Unique Visitors Per Month: 35,000 - 40,000 Page Impressions Per Month: 400,000 - 450,000 Alexa Ranking: 59,307

Now: Unique Visitors Per Month: 120,000 - 135,000 Pageviews Per Month: 800,000 - 1,000,000 Alexa Ranking: 35,112 Then: Members: 642 Threads: 2,001 Posts: 20,021 Now: Members: 3,470 Threads: 8,756 Posts: 85,237 You can also compare the price differences by clicking on the link mentioned above.