AfterDawn: News

We very rarely have news about our site on these days, but I thought it might be a good time to say few words about us, our site and so on.

Well, first of all, our "headquarters" has moved from Brooklyn, USA to London, UK. As some of you know, this site is not maintained by any company or so - we're just bunch of guys who happen have a "personal" website that generates nice amount of traffic, but unfortunately no profit :-)



And when speaking of "moving the site" - basically that just means that I personally have moved from U.S. back to Europe. And as I am the webmaster (or dictator, call me whatever you want) of this site, it's obvious that our contact address follows me. Reasons for the move were purely personal and did involve my "real-life job" and so on.

Our server is still physically located in the U.S. since we're very pleased to our ISP and hosting fees in Europe are normally much higher than those in the States.

About our traffic. We're very pleased that you guys have helped this site to grow in very nice scale. A year ago, in beginning of y2k we had only some tens of thousands of page views each month. Since then, the boost has been enormous - we're still a very small site if you compare us to any "major site", but considering the fact that our target audience is very small, we're very pleased to these numbers any way. Currently our site generates appx. 300,000 page views a month (pageviews meaning the stats that we get from our ad networks - so, they're 100% accurate and if they have some difference to real life, they tend to be slightly lower than the number of real pageviews).

Number is quite small, specially when you compare it to our bandwidth requirements -- in last week alone, our traffic was appx. 25GBs excluding all our other sites (such as MP3Lizard.com). Users download appx. 100,000 software titles a month nowadays.

I used to be very worried about our MP3 collection and its popularity. But since then, its success has also increased very steadily and has reached the point that most of our bands are very pleased to the traffic they get from us.

Skins are one area that we're going to improve a lot, but even so, users download over 10,000 skins / month. Also, the popularity of the skin voting system has increased and it is pretty similiar to the popularity of the software notification system we introduced in end of last year.



Our newsletters have over 3,000 subscribers and the number increases monthly by 10-20%.

Ok, end of the b.s. I recommend to check back often to see what new stuff we have to offer for you guys. Growing some kind of interactivity between our users and our staff is one of the primary goals of our future.

-Petteri Pyyny, webmaster
http://AfterDawn.com

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 17 Jan 2001 3:16