Oct 2006 - No More Translated Pages

Visitors to CG - Oct 2006

This is the next instalment of the history of the Coolest Gadgets site. It’s for October 2006, month 14 of the sites life.

Finding new gadgets to write about was fairly easy with the crazy USB Hamster Wheel bringing in a nice number or organic links. I also coded a simple plugin to create image based summaries of recent posts which helped get more visitors to the site from feed subscribers and automagically create internal link love.

I was also pleasantly surprised to receive a box full of free gadgets from Proporta which I was happy to review (sending a site owner freebies/review items is a great way of getting cheap/free links and a nice bit of press). One of my guest posters also kicked up a storm with his post Muslims offended by Apple Store, I’d not seen that many comments in a while and just shows what a topical post can do.

The downer of the month was Google blocking our translation script, which resulted in a drop in traffic and Adsense revenue. The translated pages were never that great from a quality point of view so I didn’t really mind, and as the translated pages had made just over $7,000 in the time they’d been up, they’d certainly done their job.

Traffic

Visitors: 212,151 (250,798)
Page Views: 480,130 (519.,998)

The figures in brackets are for the previous month, Sept 2006.

Both page views and traffic were down from the previous month. This was purely caused by our translation engine ceasing to function, it was a fun ride whilst it lasted :) .

Revenue

October 2006
Google Adsense 4,078.30 (4,241.64)
Chitika 373.92 (155.27)
Commision Junction 585.64 (395.81)
Total 5,037.86 (4,792.72)

Overall revenue was up on the previous month. The loss of translated pages had hit the Adsense revenue, I find Adsense worked pretty well with foreign visitors so that was a bit of a loss. However, back then Chitika discounted the majority of foreign clicks so losing the translated content made no odds and we also implemented the highly profitable RPU which caused our Chitika income to double over night. The affiliate income was also on the up, the affiliate programs we promote are targeted at a UK and US audience so the loss of foreign traffic was no great shakes, and the fact that some folk start their Christmas shopping in October resulted in a nice increase in sales.

By this time there were a few more income streams, but due to lack of accurate historical stats I can’t report them here.

Conclusion
Traffic down, income up, some Geo visitors are more profitable than others.

We were now approaching (well in) the Christmas season, revenue was looking good and the fact I had 2 properties along with 2 mortgages and had just handed my notice in at the 9-5 what on earth to could go wrong :) .

I will cover November and December 2006 in 2 later posts and that will be the end of the month by month series. I will do some posts concentrating on revenue, traffic etc. over longer periods of time but if you’d like me to share any more info of the site’s history please let me know via the comments.

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. I’m really enjoying the posts in this series, its very motivational and really helps to highlight how a big site like this can develop

    • Thanks Carl. I must admit at times I think it must be a pretty boring read but I’d of loved to see a site history like this when I first started out. Saying that history was the most boring subject I did at school, go figure.

  2. Just one question, how the h e double toothpicks did you get to 5k/mo in 14 months. You have mentioned you did 6 hours a day on the side to make this work. It was certainly starting to payoff at this point.

    • I thought I’d kind of documented that in this series of posts. There were no tricks or anything it is just how I’ve written

  3. Not sure what the right format would be, but I could envision some sort of “E-Book” about these posts as part of a case-study … good stuff!

  4. I am still quite impressed with the Translation page. Actually, not sure if this will work. I was thinking since Google doesn’t allow translation of your site, there is another tool - Alta Vista Babel Translation - which I feel may work for you.

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