Since launching WatchBlog a little over a week ago, I’ve been waching the referral logs and closely monitoring the statistics. When I built the site I knew that the idea would be well-received but I underestimated the amount of traffic certain web sites had. Using a variety of tools I watched as one site discovered it and linked to it — which led to another site discovering it and linking to it. This cycle seemingly never stopped and truly shows the potential power of the apt-called ‘blogosphere.” The big jump in traffic on June 19 is because Yahoo chose it as a Yahoo Pick and then BBspot linked to it.
| Date | Number of hits | Unique IPs | Transferred |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 15, 2003 | 4608 hits | 338 | 46 MB |
| June 16, 2003 | 10584 hits | 822 | 123 MB |
| June 17, 2003 | 9388 hits | 836 | 134 MB |
| June 18, 2003 | 9574 hits | 729 | 140 MB |
| June 19, 2003 | 21602 hits | 4305 | 257 MB |
| June 20, 2003 | 25318 hits | 2294 | 289 MB |
| June 21, 2003 | 14252 hits | 1187 | 183 MB |
| June 22, 2003 | 15619 hits | 1095 | 167 MB |
| June 23, 2003 | 33318 hits | 2768 | 232 MB |
Technorati shows over 100 blogs linking to WatchBlog. Sitemeter reports over 12,000 visits and over 16,000 page views in less than eight days.
Hosting Costs: I’m approaching the traffic quota at my hosting account and realize that I’ll need to move WatchBlog to a dedicated server in a few weeks and eat the excess bandwidth fees (which shouldn’t be too expensive); though, if you want to donate to WatchBlog you can. I’ll probably run a donation campaign sometime in the next month or two to cover my hosting overhead for WatchBlog.
I’ve been doing the research and am close to getting a $99/month leased server at RackShack, but am waiting to hear more about sharing half a rack at Globix with some former co-workers that has a 1MB/sec bandwidth/output cap, otherwise unlimited.
Google Adsense: Google launched their Adsense program last week and I sent in an application for WatchBlog, but for some reason it was rejected – despite the fact that WatchBlog does not meet the description of any of the sites that are prohibited. Does Google hate blogs? Even ones that are not personal but rather collaborative efforts like WatchBlog? It makes me scratch my head.
Free Advertising: On that note, I am currently offering free advertising on WatchBlog to any politically-oriented blog or Web site. Simply fill out this application to be added to the ad campaign. It’s mostly so I can test out the performance of PHPadsNew but also to get more exposure in the world of political blogs.
Call For Editors: I still need several more editors for the Republicans blog and the Third Party blog. The Democrats editors are currently out-posting the other two blogs by a three-to-one margin. To apply to become a posting editor, fill out this application.
Posted by Cameron Barrett at June 24, 2003 03:10 AM