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How we doin’?

February 23, 2009 | By James Tuckerman

It’s been two weeks since we announced that Anthill Magazine would be reducing its print frequency (in favour of a fuller, fatter quarterly) and that we would be simultaneously re-launching our website (part of a concerted push into digital media).

Most media outlets love to dish out stories of doom and gloom (except Anthill, of course). So, it didn’t come as too much of a surprise that most media coverage on our little re-structure was both light and dark in nature.

Two themes emerged:

  1. Anthill as another casualty of economic climate.
  2. Anthill as portent of print/digital convergence.

While some bloggers did seriously consider (and celebrate) the foresight involved in the decision, not one large media outlet bothered to consider the positive implications of the move, particularly from a business perspective.

So, how are we doin’?

Firstly, from day one, Monday 9 February 2009, under the new structure, we saw a big jump in traffic (a fourfold increase, in fact):

alexa web traffic 9 feb How we doin?

And then, the increase held (dipping on weekends):

alexa web traffic 14 feb How we doin?

We employed free traffic comparison site Alexa to get these numbers and threw in one old media and one new media company for the purposes of comparison. So, while these stats are not rock solid (as anyone who uses Alexa will tell you), they were free (as anyone who uses Alexa will also tell you, with even greater relish).

And how did we achieve this fourfold increase in traffic?

The cause was simple… It was you!

From the moment our announcement letter hit subscriber mail-boxes, you and your blog posts, twitter messages and email chatter snowballed our announcement into a positive viral campaign not seen since Ned Flanders almost lost the Leftorium.

(“Ned Flanders is in trouble!!!?”)

So… quite simply… thank you.

Let it be known, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated. And to quote Randy Bachman, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” icon wink How we doin?

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  • http://www.flyingsolo.com.au Robert Gerrish

    Wonderful to see James. Your fans over here at the little end of town, deffo didn’t read demise in your release and your online growth comes as no surprise. May those arrows keep heading upwards as they surely will. BTW love the new site.

    [Reply]

  • hhhmmm

    Lets get a 2nd opinion please
    http://siteanalytics.compete.com/anthillonline.com+smartcompany.com.au+brw.com.au/?metric=uv

    [Reply]

    Amanda Reply:

    Hhhmmm, that’s great! anthill’s up 196.3 percent!

    [Reply]

    Ron Z Reply:

    It’s also statistics from January.

    [Reply]

  • Jim

    Hold on I smell something fishy here: I went direct to alexa to check stats and anthillonline.com as shown in your screenshots doesn’t even exist on alexa’s database…

    [Reply]

    Tim Cinel Reply:

    Well I’ve got a Firefox extension called SearchStatus and it shows the Alexa rank of whatever site you’re on (as well as PageRank). AnthillOnline.com is Mos Def on the Alexa database.
    Link:
    http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/anthillonline.com

    [Reply]

  • http://www.rechargelife.org Brian Baulch

    Great work Jamie`s keep it up, lets show the old media, that the new media has niche and social interaction like never seen before in the small business sector

    [Reply]

  • http://www.anthillonline.com James Tuckerman

    Ever wondered why Australian media spats get so fierce? Because the stakes are so low. ;-)

    In response to the three anonymous comments above:

    Hhhmm… Thank you for directing us to Site Analytics. It’s a very cool site but the data is one month old? It only provides web traffic up to 9 Jan. We launched our new site on Feb 9.

    Amanda… Thanks for pointing out our traffic growth. I can’t wait to check Site Analytics when it can show me more up-to-date statistics. But remember, it’s not nice to impersonate other people.

    Jim… Nothing fishy. We simply went to Alexa on 9 Feb and 14 Feb, dumped in the URLs and took a screen grab each time.

    It seems that we may have stepped on some toes (which is quietly thrilling).

    To those who felt compelled to send us these anonymous messages, we’ll try to be a bit more modest with our good news in the future (and don’t be afraid… we’re only wittl’).

    [Reply]

  • Joel Scanlon

    HOT TIP: Alexa rankings are not worth the 1 and 0′s they are written on (too easily manipluated being one reason) – try using Quantcast which provides a little more of a real world gauge of traffic fluctuations.

    [Reply]

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