The number of unique visitors, that is, the number of different individuals that came to WinCustomize reached around 750,000 in November. Total number of visitors was well into the millions. WinCustomize doesn't use page views or visitors as its index of growth because we're interested in how many unique individuals are getting into customizing their machines.

The continued growth is good news for all those that like to customize their computers, create skins, create software that customizes, or just likes to hang out (though I wish our message boards got more use).

We expect traffic to significantly decrease next month. Why? Because there are now 3 new skin sites that should (we hope) begin to distribute the user base amongst more sites. For the past half year, essentially WinCustomize and DeviantART have split the traffic with the remainder going to SkinBase and elsewhere.

SkinBase, by our calculations, has seen a roughly DOUBLING of its traffic this month. It is clearly a website on the rise and one that anyone reading should definitely check out (www.skinbase.org).

But in November, 2 sites returned, desktoys.net and LotsOfSkins. In a few days, Deskmod should return. In all, there will be six major skin sites and several smaller ones.

So where has our traffic been coming from?

#1 Stardock is where 70% of our referrals come from. The parent company of this site is Stardock. So Stardock's health directly affects WinCustomize's health since as it gets more traffic, so does WinCustomize via referrals.

#2 TweakXP.com. (around 1%)That's right. Above any skin site, TweakXP sent more referrals to WinCustomize than any other customize related site.

#3 Customize.org. (around 1%). Customize.org has been up under different owners but was essentially the first skin site. It's hard to gauge how popular the site is but it must be quite popular to send so many thousands of users our way. We thank them for their support and comradeship.

#4 DeviantART (around .4%) returned to the top 5 this month. It, like WInCustomize, has experienced growing popularity. I'd trade some of our high download counts for their message board/news activity.

#5 Betanews.com (arond .4%) always hovers up there. Nate of Betanews has really been very instrumental in helping the community over the years (and not always appreciated for it).

Other sites of note:
DailyRotation: (.3%). This is THE news site for the customization community. They are a true news portal. Check them out www.dailyrotation.com.

Pixtudio: (.1%). The best of the best of skins can be found here. If WinCustomize is the Walmart of skin sites, then Pixtudio is the..um.. well that fancy store with the very best in quality stuff in it. You know, the store that smells good! The very best skins on the Internet can be found there. Okay, I'll be quiet now.

So where are we now?

We are going to open up 2 new sections next month (December) now that we have a bit of extended bandwidth. I won't give away what they are but one is for a freeware program, the other is a shareware program. Both are XP related.

We would like to look at adding some new non-XP sections. If you have a suggestion, put it below.

To qualify it must:
a) Have skins that are small (i.e. we want to avoid something that has 500K sized "themes"). Bandwidth is still very limited and I can tell you that DesktopX/Wallpaper/NeXTStart alone use 2/3rds of the bandwidth of this site. So if the program you want to support has skins of typically 500K or higher, no way. Sorry. Ideally it would be something that's typically 100K or less.

It has to be reasonably popular.

c) Has to work on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP. According to the sales stats, XP doesn't have more than 5% of the market (legally). Most people have Windows 98/ME/2000 and this site is WINCustomize not XPCustomize. We already feel pretty crappy about putting up 2 XP centric sections, we want to avoid adding more.


Anyway, things seem to be going pretty well.