265,000 hits in 18 days... can it be profitable? Should it be?

[Floris]

Yes. (except for the forum old_new icons)

[Redseal]

1 page with 15 pictures, and then 15 of those pages, loaded by the developer in 18 days for a few hours per day during developing those pages .. could easily result in that many hits. Unique traffic and traffic sources are more interesting. For example, I am ok with not having that many hits, my new site http://wetalk.tv/ only started September 1st, but in the last 30 days it went from 5k hits and 1k uniques to 9,500 uniques causing 25k hits. http://www.quantcast.com/wetalk.tv/traffic which tells me we have quite some incoming traffic, and that they browse around for a bit. And that we have a handful of return traffic (so that's the next thing for us to work on).

I like they layout and design of your forum Floris. Do you make the graphics yourself?

[Floris]

If you have vBulletin, please set yourself up for priority support so you show as a licensed customer to our staff, this way we know you've purchased a license.

[CJY3]

What are you waiting for?
Buy vBulletin, get rid of that stupid community system (phpizza or what is it's name!? ) and build up THE weather forum.

A website without content is really bad because it attracts users only one time.

Set up a forum and let the users talk about the weather and set up an area where users can interact with Rob Guarino himself.


My community had 2,046,848 hits last month, the unique visitors are what counts.

Not my site... I HAVE vBulletin. I was checking for someone else.

[MrNase]

What are you waiting for?
Buy vBulletin, get rid of that stupid community system (phpizza or what is it's name!? ) and build up THE weather forum.

A website without content is really bad because it attracts users only one time.

Set up a forum and let the users talk about the weather and set up an area where users can interact with Rob Guarino himself.


My community had 2,046,848 hits last month, the unique visitors are what counts.

[WurkAnimal]

Just by reading the main page, I was filled with ideas, ''Weather Community'' - that is a good idea.

[CJY3]

Whats the website URL?

OK, trust me, the site is not very good so far... ( he knows this ) but I have seen what is coming and it truly rocks!

robguarino.com

I get everybody else's point about unique visitors. I will be showing him this thread. Thanks.

[WurkAnimal]

Whats the website URL?

[MRGTB]

True

[Businessservices]

people should always make reference to unique visitors, using hits can be misleading.

I get approx 350 unique visitors per day, generally this is 20,000 hits per day. See there is a big difference.

[Floris]

1 page with 15 pictures, and then 15 of those pages, loaded by the developer in 18 days for a few hours per day during developing those pages .. could easily result in that many hits. Unique traffic and traffic sources are more interesting. For example, I am ok with not having that many hits, my new site http://wetalk.tv/ only started September 1st, but in the last 30 days it went from 5k hits and 1k uniques to 9,500 uniques causing 25k hits. http://www.quantcast.com/wetalk.tv/traffic which tells me we have quite some incoming traffic, and that they browse around for a bit. And that we have a handful of return traffic (so that's the next thing for us to work on).

[MRGTB]

Keep in mind he's only got that many hits from the advertising on TV, those hits I'm guessing will drop drasticly after a week or so when he's no longer advertising it on TV.

[Lenni]

I would guess 50.000 Hits per day is quite a lot for an undeveloped website.
What about uniques? He surely should think about advertising and adding content. Keep it updated so people come back and check for new things.
It should not yet be too expensive. My website currently generates 550.000 Hits per day with 7000 to 8000 uniques and it's running on a shared plan. Using around 70GB Traffic per month. But I also don't let the content be hosted on the local plan. So you need to consider the amount of traffic which could be generated when streaming videos etc. Probably it's best to go dedicated (beware of overselling bandwidth).

[CJY3]

I have a friend who is a local celebrity in the weather business. He's a TV weather guy. He just put up his own website and announced it on TV. He has done ZERO advertising of his site other than that.

In 18 days he has had 265,000 hits to his site, and the site isn't even 10% developed yet. His "guess" is that within a year, he will be getting 50,000 hits a day. Right now it is about 14,725 hits a day. ( and the current site is TERRIBLE ..... but what he has planned is AWESOME! )

He plans to market this commercially. So, I told him I would ask the masses:

1. For a site of this size, should he expect to be able to be profitable, via advertising?

2. How much might a site like this cost to run for a year.... right now it is all text and graphics, but eventually he plans to ad LIVE streaming video, plus have archived video that people can watch.

He is also considering adding a VBulletin forum to his site.

Any and all opinions / info would be appreciated.