JUST HOW BIG IS OUR FORUM

[beemaster]

Hi Everyone:

I just had to go into the Admin Panel of the Beemaster.com site (the whole pizza of which the forum is but a slice of) and got some interesting stats that I thought you all might enjoy.

In September 2004 - Beemaster.com (including the forum, all pages and links) received

* 640,455 unique hits,
* 166,449 unique visitors,
* 2.7 million pages viewed
* a total of 3,443,343,977 btyes (3.4gig) of data transfer -
* forum hits over 273,000 with nearly 60% visiting the general section
* over 40% repeat visitors to the forum
* Beekeeping Course hits over 305,300 with average visitor spending more than 40 minutes reading the material in the course

Year to date date (staggering)

* 11.73 million unique visitors
* 34 million hits (note: many are NOT spending much time at the site, but they did click on the beecourse page 82% of the time, the forum 22% and my home page 16% - all due to the high ranking in the search engines)
* over 124 thousands viewers (not members or guests) of the forum have viewed at least one page in the forum. which mind you is still not one year old!
* Beemaster.com (actually the Beecourse page) is ranked 4th highest visited beekeeping page on the Internet according to Webstat Services (a tracking service linked to my servers admin service) when searching the term BEEKEEPING - pretty cool huh. The service says it rates over 4000 web search engines.

So that's where we stand, I give YOU the membership a great amount of credit when it comes to the success of the site in its ranking and visitation. By your visiting often, you create statistics that search engines use to classify where sites are placed in their listing order. Having a large membership and a VERY LARGE annonomous visitorship who also return frequently, our forum continues to find new members and will grow to better serve the members and guests as time goes on.

I'll be talking to the NPR Producer tomorrow night and we will get together within two weeks. After the Exposure on NPR I think we may see a VERY LARGE growth in membership - I can only see that as a positive move for the forum, giving everyone a chance to meet other people and share and learn from other people's experiences.

Thanks to you all for your family friendly, helpful and insightful input that we have all gotten so much from. BTW... our forum now takes a whopping 12.6 megs of space when backing it up - that is basically TEXT ONLY since all images are OFF-SITE, so we have actually collected MORE CONTENT then the "year long" OJ Simpson Trial Transcripts. Just thought I'd toss in that rather obscure fact!

[asleitch]

You could you consider some appropriate banner adverts - e.g. for beekeeping suppliers - to assist with the cost if needed. Provided they were relevent, and not "pop-ups", and not too flashy I for one, wouldn't object.

I know you'd like to keep it independent - but it does cost to maintain websites with large numbers of hits.

Adam

[beemaster]

hi Adam:

As Temping as it sounds to frey the cost of the forum, I'm determined to swallow the bill - it's important to me to keep it that way. The last year has been a bit more costly than years past, but I still pay in a yearly fashion and it's just a single check I write, so the "STICKER SHOCK" comes and goes quickly - lol.

Thanks though for your willingness to widthstand embedded ads, I though can't stand anything that falls in the commercial aspect of a our website. It offers the advertiser the ability to nudge their "two Cents" into the way I operate the site and I just would not allow that.

I was even asked a while ago to place a donate box somewhere leading to a paypal account - this (to me) would be charity, and I'm not a charity case (maybe some would disagree - but we are not talking about my mental health here - lol) so that won't happen either.

If the cost of the site gets out of hand, then I'll just shop for a better deal, buy a larger block of space with more bandwidth, no biggy. For now, although I have a hard time contacting my server guy, the server itself is very reliable and that is my main concern.

Thanks again.