Re: 400 visitors per hour

At 12:34 PM -0800 11/1/04, Alan Dechert wrote:
>For the last 4 hours, we've been getting about 400 visitors per hour and one
>new Supporting Member per hour. To reach one million visitors in the next
>ten days, we need to increase that to about 4,000 visitors per hour.
>
>About 10 links on really active web sites would do that. The time to start
>getting those links is NOW!
>
>Alan D.

Stats so far since October 27 from Paypal:

(Paypal reports a Supporting Membership as a "subscription")

Oct 27, one new subscription, one existing subscription payment
Oct 31, one new subscription
Nov 1 (so far), 6 new subscriptions, one existing subscription
payment, $130 from 4 one-time donations

Total number of current subscribers: about 15

So in the last week we've doubled our subscriber base. We've raised
about $800 in the last month (including subscription payments on
one-time donations of October 2 though November 1).

Alan's stated immediate goal is 1,000 subscribers (over 60 times the
current figure), which corresponds to $10,000/month (over 12 times
the month ending November 1). (About $600 was raised in the month of
October.)

Alan says we're getting one new Supporting Member per 400 website
visitors. That's a very respectable paying member acquisition rate.
The extrapolation of 100,000 hits over 10 days from each of 10 sites
assumes a constant 400 hits per hour, 24 hours a day for all 10 days.
I think that's not realistic too keep up.
http://www.Electoral-vote.com gets 650,000 visitors a day, but will
get much fewer after Wednesday. If we get 6,500 visitors in the next
24 hours from that site, that's a really good click-through rate of
1%. We're unlikely to get 100,000 visitors to click through from
that site. After all, many of those visitors day-after-day to
http://www.Electoral-vote.com are likely repeat visitors.

Therefore, to get 1,000,000 visitors to OVC from placement with a 1%
clickthrough rate, we need to be placed on 100,000,000 (one hundred
million) web page views in the next 10 days. That's a pretty tall
order.

After the election, I will try to get some mailing lists to mention
us in their post election analysis on electronic voting machines.
Those are likely to get a higher clickthrough rate, but it will still
be a challenge to get 1,000 subscribers in 10 days.

Best regards,
Arthur

P.S. Since I started drafting this message, there has been one more
subscription sign up and another one-time donation of $10.

P.P.S. I've worked with dot-coms in the Internet advertising
business, so I'm familiar with the issues of clickthroughs and
subscriber conversion rates.

-- 
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Arthur M. Keller, Ph.D., 3881 Corina Way, Palo Alto, CA  94303-4507
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