So where did that traffic come from?
1) Stardock: 68% (up from 63% las month)
2) DeskMod: 7% (down from 11% from last month)
3) DeviantArt: 2.8% (same as last month)
4) LotsOfSkins: 1.5% (down from 2%)
T-shirts are in manufacturing and should be available soon. That and the CDs should hopefully offset the costs of the site.
With CD sales, we were about $3,600 over budget for the month so we still need to find a way to generate an additional $3,600 per month to pay for the increased band width.
The only scarey thing is that if traffic were to increase this month, we'd max out the bandwidth.
We are probably going to have to institute steps to decrease bandwidth use fairly soon unless the shirts and CDs do pretty well. This will likely come in the form of limiting downloads for those who haven't created accounts to 5 megabytes (or even requiring accounts to download). The next step would be to require users who are downloading many megabytes of WB skins or icon packages and Desktopx themes to at least be registered usres. I.e. if you've downloaded 20 MEGABYTES of WindowBlinds skins but you haven't registered WindowBlinds or bought Object Desktop, that's obviously a bad thing.
We don't expect anything significant to happen in August, we actually expect traffic to decline as August is one of the slowest months of the year due to vacations and such so hopefully the T-shirts will make up the difference. We only have to sell 300 T-shirts per month (0.15% of the monthly uniques) to stay on budget (Stardock gives us a $5,000 grant per month to gaurantee that this site will always be here, but we're currently spending $10,000 per month).
This month's new section is Convergence. It'll probably be the last new section we add for a bit (until bandwidth is under control).
We're very happy with how things are going though. Afterall, the only reason why bandwidth is even an issue is because the site has grown so much.