A Month in Review – November

This is the first in a monthly series I am going to write to let you all know what is going on behind the scenes of the site. First off, thanks to all for your commitment to the List Universe and for spreading its name to all of your friends. We are still increasing in popularity each month and it is really great to see lots of new nicknames in the comments. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank Cyn for her tireless efforts on the forums battling spam bots, and for her help on the main site dealing with outages, spam, and comments.

Statistics

In the month to today we have had our first list reach more than 200 comments (in an amazing 2 days). The list was, of course, Top 15 Beatles Songs. We also published our 300th list and passed the 10,000th comment mark.

We are ranking in the top 19,000 websites over all with Alexa, and are now in the top 3,000 blogs according to Technorati. We are averaging over 45,000 page views per day and have over 2,000 RSS subscribers.

Updates

The newly introduced Hotlinks seem to be doing okay, but I could do with more submissions! You can submit anything you think our readers would like – it doesn’t have to be a list, and you can submit your own blog articles if you wish.

I have finally removed one of the levels of advertising from the site – the Amazon text links. These were slowing the page loading down and causing some confusion when they auto-linked to books or DVDs that were not relevant. This means that the revenue on the site is down so if you feel able, feel free to use the donations button at the top right of this page.

Christmas Competition

People seem to have forgotten about our Christmas competition! Please send in your submissions – Christmas is only one month and one week away! We have received a small number of submissions so far but we need more to help carry the site through the Christmas period.

Help Wanted

It seems to me that we really do need additional help on the site (especially as I will be away for Christmas) so I am now asking for people to consider joining the staff. I need a comitted person who is able to write at least two lists a day. Rather than paying with the regular submission prices I am willing to negotiate a monthly payment. If you are interested, send me an email and let me know what your time is worth.