b5media

September 23rd,2005

Closing Out Week 1

By Jeremy Wright

We’ve been continuing to tidy things up, lock down the blogs and generally improve the way things are going here at b5. Practically speaking, a few improvements have been made:

- We gave our authors 2 new tools (a cleaner uploading one, and a new stats package so they can see per-blog stats on their own).
- We re-organized Literally Blogging to focus more on “classic literature” - it remains to be seen whether we’ll launch a more mainstream blog to compliment it.
- Launched new designs on Cellphone9 an Play Girlz courtesy of The Blog Studio
- Added AdSense / Chitika to many of the remaining blogs
- Brought a new author (Gilad) on to write for the Search Engine Herald

Day 2 was exciting for us, as Flightnest saw a huge jump in traffic, due mainly to their coverage of an emergency landing at LAX which was picked up by a variety of blogs, including the biggest of the big boys, Engadget (thanks guys!). To date, more than 2000 visitors have come to the blog from Engadget (since our stats are “live”, we got to watch the 10-30 visitors per minute Engadget was driving which was thrilling!).

This means that Flightnest is currently our most popular blog, which is fantastic! Congrats Mike and Tim!

While trends are fairly useless this early in the game, it’s always nice to see numbers going up. Here is the summary view of all b5 blogs, for traffic (as an example) (click for full sized version):

note: the traffic figures below are from Saturday - Thursday, so only 2 days of this is “live” data.

Since Flightnest and the main b5 site are currently throwing these numbers off a bit, here’s the same graph, without the two anomalous blogs (click for full sized version):

This upward trend of 10-20% daily growth is being seen across the network, in AdSense revenue, in Chitika revenue, in subscriptions. It’s good, and I applaud the blog authors for all doing a fantastic job.

It’s been a big first week, and most of us will be mainly taking the weekend off to recoup, but we’ll be back next week, maybe even with a new blog or two ;-)