Another month is in the books, and I took a few moments to see how we were doing with traffic and revenue and all that. June was a pretty good month.
CoasterBuzz did better than I expected. In terms of year-over-year growth I wasn't expecting much since the site hasn't fundamentally changed in any particular way, either by my doing or by the composition of the regulars in the community. It still had page views up an astonishing 16% over last year and visits up a more modest 8%. Pages per visit are now up to 5.25, and keep in mind that includes the drive-by 40% who land there somehow and leave. The average non-logged in user still views 4.25 pages, and that's surprising. Not surprising, CoasterBuzz Club members view about 15 pages per visit. Club members account for 15% of all page views.
PointBuzz is holding steady on page views, with a rounding error of a decline, but is up over 10% on visitors. I really expected a slide this year because Cedar Point didn't open a new coaster, but not opening the new water ride might have been good for us. Go figure. Pages per visit is down to 7.27, but that's still pretty solid for any site.
The big story this year is ad revenue. It's back. Really back. Literally double what it was last year, and most of that story is from Google. I can't tell exactly what gets run, but it looks like there's a lot of spending from Disney, Las Vegas stuff and a number of dot-com-ish sites. I so could've used this last year when I was job-free, but better late than never, I suppose. The business will be in a debt-free state again probably by October. As thrilled as I am about this, I'm realistic, because experience has shown that the ad market can be very erratic, and economic recovery is not, as of yet, a slam dunk.
So what's the future like? Well, I still haven't launched that Disney site that Walt and I came up with over two years ago. It actually exists, and it's mostly functional, but the forums and photo galleries have not yet been styled. Something makes me uncomfortable about it too... the weird mix of Webforms and MVC (with no real testing). Working full-time in a world with solid unit testing and high maintainability has really become my curse to all things old in my own projects.
At one point, I figured that I'd like to get a new version of CoasterBuzz out within two years of the last one, but that means by September 1, and that ain't gonna happen. But perhaps if I got the new forum app in a usable state, the rat site could be the proving ground for it. I find myself hesitant in improving CoasterBuzz, I guess because I'm not sure of its growth potential.
I definitely want to build something new with my mess of domain names. Something that isn't another theme park site. Alas, there isn't enough time I can find.
Futurecasting aside, I'm pretty happy with how the existing sites are doing. That CB showed solid growth and PB didn't shrink without a new coaster definitely exceeds my expectations. And for Google to be kicking ass the way they are with ads, it definitely feels good to have this hobby.
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