Referral wise, and referrals are the lifebood of this site most users came from Stardock again.
Out of the skin sites
#1 Customize.org
#2 DeviantART (85% of Customize.org)
#3 DeskMod (22% of Customize.org)
#4 Pixutdio (13% of Customize.org)
#5 LotsOfSkins (6% of Customize.org)
#6 Skinz.org (5% of Customize.org)
#7 SkinBase (4% of Customize.org)
The referrals are all appreciated and the fact that the sites link to each other shows the cooperation between them. We're going to have to expand our # of links to at least 6 since to fit the new skin sites.
In December we had 774,000 UNIQUE visitors (not to be confused with hits or visitors, this is the number of actual different people who visited the site). This is up from 741,000 in November.
So what OS did you people use?
Windows 2000: 42%
Windows 98: 25%
Windows XP: 18%
Windows ME: 11%
Windows NT: 2%
Wndows 95: 1%
(Was Windows ME a flop or what??)
Now, here's some data you don't normally see and it's important - how many "Regulars" does this site have? Often times the word "community" is bandied about qiuckly and easily. How many people are in such a community?
Here are some stats that give you an idea of the immensity of such a community:
10,000 different people last month visited the site over 100 times. I would say those people are DEFINITELY very interested in customization.
If you look at the # of people who visited the site on average once per day the number jumps to over 45,000 (up from 42,000 in November).
And these users are mostly power users. For 75% (3 out of 4) run at 1024x768 or higher resolution. Only 22% run at 800x600 or lower. This implies users who are more confident with their knowledge of computers and have higher end hardware.
Getting back to the usual problem of bandwidth. Really, we have no idea how the other skin sites do it (except for the ones with relatively low bandwidth requirements). At the tail end of November we upgraded WC's bandwidth to 20 megabits to handle the traffic (we're not maxed out on bandwidht anymore but the we could use more hardware now
). I can tell you that bandwidth alone costs enough each month to put the downpayment on a pretty decent car. This site gets funded by Stardock. Admittedly at some point we're going to have to find ways for the site to start helping pay for itself more. There are several other skin sites that you can download your skins and themes from that are excellent: DeviantART (www.deviantart.com), Deskmod (www.deskmod.com), Skinbase (www.skinbase.org), Customize.org (www.customize.org), LotsOfSkins (www.lotsofskins.com), and skinz.org (www.skinz.org). So if this site feels slow or anything, check those sites out, they're all great.
Plus, if you want to help this site, please feel free to buy a shirt or a CD or Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com).
As we end 2001, PC desktop customization has, as predicted exploded with the release of Windows XP. Despite only makin gup 17% of the population of the site, they regular push skins to the top of the download charts.
Happy new year!
