One of the nice things about that little Hitbox thingy at the bottom of the pages is that it is able to use cookies to determine how many
unique visitors this site receives as opposed to the more generic and inflated "user sessions".
In August, WinCustomize climbed to over 1 million unique visitors for the first time. Think about that a MILLION different people visited the site. It's still a far cry from say Yahoo that gets something like 30 million unique people on per month. But then again, we're not a search engine. Skinning has gone mainstream.
And the results are breath taking. Take a look at some of the skins that came out (and this is just a quick look):
Sportsman (Alexandrie): https://www.wincustomize.com/library2/Alexandrie/wb/sportsman.jpg
Alien Mind (APB): https://www.wincustomize.com/library2/APB/wb/ss_AlienMind.jpg
Dynamo (Aleksyandr): https://www.wincustomize.com/library2/Aleksyandr/wb/Dynamo.jpg
There's a hard core base of around 50,000 people who visit the site every day with another 50,000 who visit the site a few times per week.
Most of them are using Windows XP.
Referral wise, excluding search engines Stardock represented 82% of referrals. The other skin sites (deviantART, Deskmod, ArtUpRoar, Skinbase, etc.) accounted for 2%.
Other community sites such as Neowin, Betanews, TweakXP, ICQPlus, and others accounted for 7%. 9% of referrals came from other sources (like TechTV, Avault, etc).
While it's obviously been a good summer for Stardock's apps, it's been a good summer for Litestep, Winamp, Windows Media Player and even PocketPC apps like Dashboard (Snoopsoft is now the #2 NON-SD referral).
Site-wise the age old problems still remain - bandwidth and CPU resources. The bandwidth problem is being taken care of thanks to a deal worked out with Betanews where we're leasing some of their bandwidth. We'll now be able to fulfill one of our long term goals of being able to provide backup to skin authors - we keep 2 copies of a skin in real time so if one server goes down, the skin is on another server still and we can pick and choose which server to download from based on bandwidth availability.
But it's actually CPU that's most problematic right now. Barring clustering (easier on paper than in reality), when you have several hundred people on the site at the same time, it creates strains on the servers. We're working on distributing this out more but it'll take time.
Thankfully we're able to even do this because of the early success of the new WinCustomize subscriptions. Thank you to everyone who has purchased one! Feel free to get one at https://www.wincustomize.com/store.asp
As we move towards Fall
things wil likely pick up further. Lots of exciting things coming up in terms of new software.
The first WinCustomize subscriber premium suite ought to be ready in the next few weeks along with premium Icon sets and WindowBlinds visual styles which we think will not only help the site but help skin authors justify the time they put into this stuff (which in turn will create even more skins and themes for users to freely download).
Have fun!
