What do you do when being a success costs you money?
When we first put AMM up on the Web about a year ago, along with our other monthly charges, we paid an extra $150 to get a full hit report. Each week we'd look at which pages were most popular, and marvel at the fact that twenty or thirty people a day were reading the mag. We could tell a little bit about them, who was using the work or uni connection and who the few dedicated webaholics were, still online at 3am. It was all useful data for a publisher looking towards a future new media.
We promoted the site in our last print magazine, then we put a small ad in The Australian Tuesday computer section (which cost us about $1000) and the hits rose for the next three days from 200 to 2000.
We estimated that as about 1000 new readers before it dropped back again. If we had been seriously promoting the site, we would know that those visitors had cost us $1 a head, hardly good value. But we weren't promoting the site heavily working on other projects, and we obviously didn't feel the value was there to advertise in print any further.
When we put up the January bumper issue of AMM this year, for the first time we were happy enough with it to make sure we were listed on all the search engines. That was promotion that didn't cost us anything, and it worked. The day that Yahoo sent an e-mail to say we were now in the database, the traffic started. Within days the graph looked like this.
The bulk of visitors were from the US, and broke down into domains as shown in the pie-chart below. As a percentage the uniquely Australian hits are lost in the bits down the bottom. But the Australian readership had picked up as well, as the list of top domains shows.
HTTP Server Domain Statistics
Covers: 01/14/96 to 01/21/96 (8 days).
All dates are in local time.
2 levels, sorted by number of requests, 58 unique domains.
21916 : 761 : 01/21/96 : (numerical domains)
17891 : 607 : 01/21/96 : US Educational (.edu)
13749 : 416 : 01/21/96 : US Commercial (.com)
8135 : 279 : 01/21/96 : Network (.net)
4638 : 116 : 01/21/96 : Australia (.au)
3062 : 120 : 01/21/96 : Canada (.ca)
1989 : 67 : 01/21/96 : Germany (.de)
1885 : 45 : 01/21/96 : .au.com
1803 : 21 : 01/21/96 : South Korea (.kr)
1732 : 68 : 01/21/96 : Japan (.jp)
1492 : 35 : 01/21/96 : Singapore (.sg)
1450 : 10 : 01/21/96 : .kr.co
1202 : 32 : 01/21/96 : .au.edu
937 : 18 : 01/21/96 : .sg.com
936 : 26 : 01/21/96 : Finland (.fi)
919 : 22 : 01/21/96 : .au.net(and so on down the list until you get to those with 1 hit only, probably text browsers who didn't like the front page at all. If you really want to see the full list...)
We were pretty excited, the management smiled and were suitably perplexed. Then we started to get bills for the excess number of hits served. Big bills for a publication that wasn't making any money from sales to the extra readers, or from an advertiser happy to get the extra hits on their material. There was still enough interest in the concept from our management to let the magazine continue to sit there, thinking each month that it would soon drop back to the low hundreds again. It didn't, (the latest stats are here.).
For six months now, thousands of people have been reading the material online and we've been paying out that $2-300 dollars for excess server costs. We had to make a change. Either we were serious about the potential of an online magazine or we should stop giving away Matt Handbury's money for nothing and get out of it altogether.
As you see, we're still here. If we can attract that sort of readership online, I feel we obviously have an interesting product. If we can deliver that same reader interest to a sponsor then perhaps we can be paid to continue doing it. The pressure now is to find those sponsors and advertisers who appreciate the traffic and to do it without turning away you, the readers.
To lower our costs we've made a move to another service provider, TPG Internet, who have offered us a lot of assistance. We'll be watching the new hit reports very carefully, but the biggest flaw is that they don't tell us how you feel about the publication and why you dropped by. If you've got the time, head to our forumm section and add a message to any of the editorial threads or just send us some e-mail and tell us why you came and what we can do to make MM suit your needs.
