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Diary Entries See also Site Info & Diary.
17 February 2002 Goodbye TheCounter.com, but how come not Hello FastClick.com? + 6 month report...
  There used to be a page counter at the bottom of virtually every page on this site, provided courtesy of TheCounter.com, but no more (all finally removed 1 Mar).

I received an email from them back on the 4th of this month: “Your account number xxxxxx exceeds 5,000 hits per day. Based on TheCounter.com stats activity through December 2001, the super premium rate for your Web site is $587.45 for a 12-month membership.”. Knowing how many people have visited the site is very useful (and encouraging), but it isn't worth $600 to me.
  One obvious way to have replaced the functionality provided by TheCounter.com would have been to have a banner ad - these things also provide stats for the site hosting them. I eagerly did a search on Google and found a bunch of opportunities. The largest (DoubleClick) seems to make it very difficult to apply to host their banners but, eventually, I managed to find this page, demanding 1 million page hits plus “affiliate candidates should demonstrate current promotional and marketing programs used to drive traffic to your site”. My site is currently ¾ million page hits monthly plus I don't do any advertising whatsoever. This is clearly where I'm going wrong.
  Gavin, a colleague at work, is Web-Master for the Nottingham Outlaws, (a Rugby League Football club) with a front page that makes my site look amateur. The banner on his site is from FastClick and they were number 2 on the Google listing. FastClick's Terms & Conditions specified only 2,500 page hits per month (mine was 154,732 last week) - clearly we were in business. Unfortunately I did not notice the bit in Section d where it specified exclusion to sites “hosted by a free service” & should not therefore have been surprised when they replied the following day “.. we are unable to approve your site as a publisher on our network at this time”. Bastards!
  I spent 10 years in my 20s and 30s selling media advertising - I clearly wasn't very good at it, or I'd still be doing it - and, as always with the Internet, I'm amazed at this little exploration into online media advertising. I never did find the link to apply to host DoubleClick banners, and the fact that my site gets 268 times more hits per week than their minimum requirement is apparently not enough to convince FastClick to provide banners. Hmm.
  At this point I'll do a 6-month report on the site (an update to the 16 Aug report):
    Current Site:
    • 150,000 page-impressions each week (8 million yearly)
    • 170 modem manufacturers/retailers
    • 46 modem chipsets
    • 74 pages of help
    Being-developed Site:
    • 0 page-impressions each week
    • 180 modem mfrs/retailers (15 computer, 120 modem, 45 retail)
    • 40 chipset manufacturers
    • 282 modem chipsets
    • 0 pages of help
  Construction of the database for the new site continues - 6 months work so far. Most of the work has consisted of the design & construction of the framework for the site, with only enough cladding (actual database entries, to depart from the building analogy for a moment) to ensure that it all stands up & works.

The heart of the site is the modems themselves and, like all animals, they have 2 parents. One is the actual manufacturer, and the other is the modem chipset manufacturer - mother & father respectively, I reckon. The first 4/5 months were spent getting to grips with the tools I was to use and building up to the point where the modems could be entered. I'd been concentrating mostly on the modem Manufacturers up to this point (only half the story) so had to turn to the chip Manufacturers before the modems table could be completed, and this is where the last few weeks have been spent. In the course of this I've multiplied the already considerable number of chipsets that I was dealing with by a factor of 6 - six times more work than I was expecting - but now have the end of this section in sight.

I reckon on probably another 3 months of work before the site is up & running, which will make 9 months of preparation - then, as all parents know, the real work begins.