Okay, traffic first. Overall, Phoenyx hits are up about 10% (conservatively... liberally, we're up 40%, but a good chunk of that can be attributed to increased hits from banner CGI et al rather than legitimate new traffic) over December, plus whatever traffic we get today, and steadily climbing. I have no idea why, other than more and more places are linking to us, and we're getting better positioning in search engines as I fine-tune keywords, I guess. Or maybe the net is just growing lots. I've been doing some researching on banner ads, and what I'm seeing says a 2-3% click-through rate is about typical for a well-done ad. Ours are sitting at: Kalyr 3.345% TKR 7.103% Westwind 5.000% Car Wars 3.539% Fuge 1.515% (I really need to redo that banner, and yes, I mistyped) Phoenyx 1.098% (semi-ditto, except it's really a filler banner and don't expect too much traffic until we get a lot more non-Phoenyx sites. Who's going to click a Phoenyx banner when they're already there?) Ultimatim 5.263% (which is less impressive when you realize that percentage is only one click, probably Tim hisownself, out of only 19 displays...) PBMCube 0.000% (he's unlikely to get any clickthroughs until he gets around to showing a banner... I really should email him) Personally, I think people are more likely to click when there *isn't* an annoying animation blinkitying at them. Targeted advertising is also working in our favor, of course. Pester any non-Phoenyx PBeM website maintainers you know to join up: http://www.phoenyx.net/bp/ is the banner homepage. Lastly, the obligatory periodic guilt trip: back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that we could sell about 10,000 impressions a month to a commercial banner advertiser. That's between $200 and $500 a month we're not making by not selling out to the man. But, you know, after reading about the DoubleClick doublecross, it's a whole lot easier to not worry about that money right now... (FWIW, we're paying close to $250/month for the Phoenyx connection, on account of bandwidth here in flyover country ain't cheap yet. It's getting cheaper, however, and once we satisfy ourselves that it's going to be acceptable quality, we'll be switching to a DSL line at < $100/month. That'll be pretty helpful when our spending money gets cut by about $1500/month starting in June-ish. Feel free to refer freelance Perl programming and web stuff my way at any time.) -- -------------------------------------------------------------- Listowner tools are found at http://www.phoenyx.net/listowners
