YachtForums July 2010; 300,000 Unique Visitors...!!!

Over the past 3 months, YF has seen an extraordinary growth period that has resulted in an interesting divergence, indicative of a content-rich website reaching a deeper level of propagation. In December 2009, we published the images of ‘Absolutely’, resulting in a large increase in traffic as forums and news sites around the net began linking to YF. At that time, we set a new record for monthly hits and unique visitors:

• Hits: 38,521,864
• Visitors: 218,923

In January 2010, we went live with the video ‘Absolutely’ and blasted past the December stats…

• Hits: 43,006,093
• Visitors: 244,370

February, March & April of 2010 saw a return to normalcy, with an average of 36 million hits a month and around 215,000 monthly readers. What has happened since is nothing short of phenomenal. I haven’t paid attention to our stats for the past few months because I’m working on a project unrelated to YF and I’ve had a busy travel schedule. In May of 2010, we had a sharp increase in visitors that set a new record, yet we hadn’t published anything out of the ordinary for that month. At first, I assumed this was from PMY’s forum closing down, but the extra 30,000 visitors that came to YF in May is probably more traffic than PMY had.

• Hits: 36,962,464
• Visitors: 246,835

While I was galloping the globe in June, YF’s traffic swelled once again, setting another record that had me double checking our stats program with diagnostics.

• Hits: 36,430,189
• Visitors: 263,451

A sharp rise in stats for one month is usually news related. A 2 month rise can be a precursor, but after 3 months… it’s a pattern. And a very interesting divergence. I’ll explain after today’s stats, which is only July 28th, leaving another 4 days of stats to accumulate.

• Hits: 35,612,924
• Visitors: 278,917 (as of July 27th)

For July, our daily number of unique IP addresses logging onto YF will narrowly miss 10,000 per day. Doing the math on this, we will exceed 300,000 visitors for the month of July!!!

Getting back to the divergence… as you know, “Hits” are a meaningless measure of a website’s performance. “Unique visitors” is the real gauge of a website’s traffic. Typically, Hits and Visitors rise or fall in sympathy, but when the number of Visitors rises sharply, yet the Hits remain relatively constant… this departure is associated with websites that become top tier in a sector. In other words, the site is not dependent on various links from around the net. Instead, traffic comes as a result of website becoming a bookmark and a benchmark.

I’ve attached a copy of YF’s Webalizer chart. Disregard Aug-Sept-Oct from last year because I flushed the stats to improve server performance. The stats take huge system resources! The number of Hits are located on the top left of the chart. The number of Visitors is in yellow on the right side. Notice the number of referring sites (in orange) is declining, because I don't solicit outside links. It only brings curiosity seekers, not seriously interested readers. What's most important is the quality of our readership, which is clearly on the rise.

With 300,000 visitors, it’s safe to say we may have a larger circulation than any yachting magazine in the world. And probably more than a few of them combined.

How did this happen? Because of you guys!

***​

Not quite an empire yet, YF barely breaks even. But it’s not about money. It’s about creating a better resource, which just happened to blossom into a better media. And somewhere along the way, it became home for a lot of us. I’ve said this before and it bears repeating… YF doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to all of us and specifically those who have shared their knowledge here. I’m proud to be a part of this!

It took us 6 years to reach a monthly average of 200,000 readers. Over the past 3 months, we've seen a whopping 30% increase in traffic. Here's the final tally for July 2010... 309,324 visitors for the month!

I got YF to it's first few million hits with good content & coding, but it's been the collective knowledge of YF's members that has driven the rest of our traffic. We know YF's reviews generate a lot of traffic because the forum index pages show the views and they're off the chart, but the majority of people come to YF for the experience and expertise of our members.

Prior to the Internet, information was limited to local docks, marinas, magazines and boat shows. Only a fraction of the world's population can afford yachts, leaving most owners on their own to source information, but with about 50% of our members owning boats 50 feet and over, the wealth of information available to them, as well as buyers, is driving our traffic and creating a new informational paradigm.

Gone are the days when a buyer depends solely on the advise of a broker or salesman to buy a yacht. Today, buyers turn to the Internet and the opinions of experienced, like-minded people to make big dollar decisions.

You guys have made YF rock. I'm just here to keep the boat from capsizing.

More sure than your spelling.