Last month we dished out over 3 TERRABYTES of bandwidth. That's an astounding level of bandwidth (greater than the internal bandwidth used by most companies -- 10baseT ethernet).
Where does that bandwidth go? It's not WindowBlinds actually. It's DesktopX and Wallpapers that use up the most (and the overall majority of the bandwidth) and then at a distant third it's WindowBlinds followed by IconPackager.
In 2001, 5.3 million unique people came to WinCustomize. That's a lot of people and it shows that PC customization on Windows has really made it to the big time.
A couple of years ago, "skinning" was seen as a small niche by "hackers". And yet each day, around 30,000 different people visit this site, many of whom visit several times a day.
Out of that 5+ million, over 400,000 of them became at least occasional users of the site and indeed, we now boast a registered membership of voer 200,000 people (considering we didn't launch until the end of last March just shows how much customization on Windows has grown!).
Since April, we have increased the number of monthly visitors from around 120,000 visits to well over a million visitors per month.
Moreover, the number of "regulars" (people who visit every day) has also increased substantially. From around 8,000 in April to around 36,000 in December. So if you ever thought that you're alone in thinking making your GUI look different or wanting more out of Media Player or simply like getting a new wallpaper was unusual, suffice to say that you are in good company. Lots of people are finding out that it's fun, cool, and often productive to customize their PC's.
And it's grown enough that when WinCustomize started, there were only 2 other high volume skin sites around - DeviantART and Deskmod. Now, there are several - Skinz, Skinbase, DeviantART, LotsOfSkins, Customize.org, Deskmod, and more. All of which are doing very well and growing in a similar fashion.
What's also amazing is the level of cooperation. 2 years ago, the various skin sites that existed in those days would often have very little cooperation and competed with one another. Today, all the skin sites work together and it would not be inaccurate to say that most of the admins of each site consider the other admins to be friends. And the admins of the various sites visit the other sites. You'll find me on every skin site. You'll see Jark (of DeviantART) on various sites as well.
We'll look at more changes and things in the next part.
