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I don’t think I am giving anything away when I say the facebook stats page at the start of 2009 said: 150MM users 50% of whom log in daily i.e. 75MM daily users and today says 300MM 50% of which log in daily i.e. 150MM daily visitors. Hitwise, Comscore, Compete, Nielsen etc… tend to back this up. However Google trends for websites not so much.

I think there is some more work to be done here esp. since one of the largest sites on the web can have such inaccurate data on Google trends. This is a shame since I really think google trends for websites and adplanner are awesome tools and this makes me lose a little faith in them 🙁 That being said plain old Google trends data looks fine.

According to all the data I look at regularly the second half of 2009 has really been a deviation from trend for them in terms of growth. They are doing a really great job. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening?

• email – the summary emails they are sending out now
• seo – the new business pages they launches doing great
• external – economy recovering a little, more jobs

I would love to get your thoughts.

A year ago I was writing a blog post entitled “The Power of Focusing on Something” but in the end I couldn’t get it into great shape to post and so I chose to step back and leave it alone. Finally I am ready to post something a year on 🙂

Examples of losing focus for me

Read in:

I have now prepared a few examples that make a lot of sense and I wanted to share. The great thing about having your own projects or your own business as a sole proprietor is you have no one to blame but yourself when something goes right or something goes wrong. My websites provide this for me.

At every major life change my website performance slipped esp. in terms of revenue (which is in my experience driven more by short term focus than traffic for advertising driven websites – sales, network choice and optimization etc…). Each of these changes was very necessary and good for me overall but the websites provide a good independent measure of how they distracted me from other things in my life. These changes took away focus and losing focus harmed performance.

Regaining Focus

I have settled into my job at Facebook now and so have some time to focus on my websites again. One thing I did recently was start to focus on videos of me making paper airplanes. These videos get a lot of positive feedback, are easier to follow than diagrams of me making paper airplanes and thanks to the new youtube revenue sharing also make me money.

Daily views on my videos have doubled and now something between 200 and 600 hours a day are spent by people viewing videos of me making paper airplanes in fact on average every visitor to my site views one paper airplane video.

My Conclusions

All of this spills into my real life. During those periods of negative website performance I also stopped going to the gym, stopped going out and really became pretty introverted.

So bottom line focus = results and lack of focus = fail. If you are going to make a major change as a business, as a team leader, as an individual, as a wife, husband, son, father, brother or whatever realize that it’s a trade off and make that trade off of focus explicit. Is the upside of a new focus worth the downside of focusing less on something else?

One of the most interesting things I have noticed about SEO is that as you develop a site with a lot of credibility in a field you can do a lot to drive results in related long tail terms in that field by just leveraging your own domain. This is old hat and I have long used it for areas like playing with getting long tail cocktail terms ranked.

I however have never really tested doing this from scratch until recently, with my cocktail site, I found the time to create a new section of the sites for all ingredients that exist in the database.

Within a month this entirely new site section has become 5% of total traffic entering the site and is growing very nicely. One other really nice factor is the targeted nature of these visits means that they have only a 20% bounce rate and so are engaging v. nicely with the site in general since on entering they probably want to browse around… this is different to cocktails where typically they want that one cocktail and then are done and leave in >40% of the cases.

At the moment my big question is whether or not to launch a US version of the site or just port this entire site to .com and try and leverage the backlinks and SEO success into being a top 5 cocktail site globally instead of just in the UK. I also need to get the cocktail recommendation engine restarted because after migrating servers last year to deal with the increasing volume of the site I forgot to turn the engine on, broke the code and since the impact was only gradual only finally noticed this year that I had screwed up and my bounce rates for cocktails were once again through the roof.

One of the things I love about running my little websites is they help me get my head out of the valley environment (or my ass depending on your point of view) since it is a hugely skewed demographic. The users of my sites are not valley types at all. In paper airplanes it’s mums, dads, kids and teachers. On cocktail recipes it’s a huge wide ranging audience… mainly non-US and over a huge age range but generally skewed towards a lower income demographic.

Trends that are big in the valley sometimes take a decade to bust out of the valley into the broader consciousness; for example RSS or Blogging. Some bust out of the valley seemingly instantly and find their main life outside; for example social networking or online classifieds. It feels like the mobile internet/internet everywhere is an example of the former and has been called out as the next big thing now for almost a decade.

There is a burgeoning microtrend happening across my websites in an area we have been talking about in the tech industry for seemingly eons. I am seeing all kinds of new operating systems appearing on the list of operating systems my users are using to access my site. The big 4 in order are: iPhone, Danger Hiptop, Playstation Portable and iPod. These new operating systems are now just shy of 1% of visits to my sites.

That 1% number is pretty important to me… think 1% of internet advertising revenue being $300MM annually (ish) or 1% of goods sold on eBay being $600MM annually (ish). This is important to me since a $30MM market isn’t really big enough to make the big guys look at it but this volume of potential is finally proving worth the effort.

Maybe I am overhyping the importance of average websites as canaries in the coalmine but I feel these sites are not a tech savvy demo, not designed with mobile in mind and if they are still getting c. 1% of visits from mobile this is a good indicator of a base line of mobile interest.

I have always loved the ideas of mobile internet transforming the world but I never saw how there was enough revenue there to really support a company. Now I see it and I am very excited about seeing what all the clever folks around here do to use the internet everywhere.

The growth of my cocktail recipe website has been truly scary this year. I am into my second year of >100% year on year growth in the site, I have doubled in volume since January and if anything growth is accelerating.

The plan of course is to keep growing and doing well. I am currently at 2/3 of the bandwidth limit my web hosting company allow me which although cool is very scary when you look at last year’s traffic distribution numbers.

The main point of this note is to encourage you guys to check out your code. I just recoded the displaycocktail.php script on my site (which accounts for 20% of bandwidth and >50% of files served). It turns out this script (which has grown organically and been coded in chunks since 2001) is horribly inefficient. I reduced the lines of code in the script by 55% to just 304 including all HTML and the weight of the page produced by 21% which will reduce my bandwidth usage by 4-5% which is cool and also has halved the SQL queries per page load on that page.

Efficiency is dull but I am hugely glad I did this and am looking forward to running through the rest of the site spring cleaning in Fall. If nothing else it will allow me to have a much smaller, easier codebase to maintain which is definitely good news!!!

I have been working pretty hard on my own facebook app now for a week. It is all about cocktail recipes (surprise surprise right!) and it’s pretty decent in my opinion and getting better but facebook isn’t approving apps into their directory v. frequently right now and I haven’t made it very viral (d’oh), am working on that.

That being said I browse the developer boards on facebook a lot and stumbled onto the following post by Aryeh Goldsmith.

His application simply let’s you send anyone on facebook a “secret admirer” notification telling them that they have a secret admirer but not who from. He has a “hot list” of all the most admired people (who are of course all gorgeous girls) and I believe you find out who the secret admirer is if you add yourself as a secret admirer of that person (but am not sure of that). Given how the facebook platform works this is an amazingly simple, low weight application with massive viral potential and it has chalked up 100,000 users without even entering the facebook directory. That TRULY shows the viral potential of facebook apps and the amazing distribution that the f8 platform has exposed. I hope facebook doesn’t become myspace, I love facebook too much but with the restrictions of their network and the similarity of my friends to me I really don’t see that happening. A REALLY clever roll out and facebook deserve lots of plaudits.

One of the fun things about my blog is I get to meet awesome people all the time and one of those people is Will Wynne (another is Pete Flint which makes sense if you read the link below). Will was a colleague when I worked in the eBay UK office who has set up an amazing flower delivery startup in the UK called Arena Flowers and has just set up a blog to go with it as well.

A year ago when Will was thinking about starting out he and a partner came out here and spent some time talking to me about SEO and how to get to the top of search engine rankings. Lo and behold they really listened to me and did far more reading awesome blogs on the topic and digging deep into the webmasterworld and digital point forums.

The result was they gained a tonne of traffic really quickly and although I guess now SEO isn’t so important to them as they have tonnes of repeat satisfied customers, great press and really seem to have nailed their SEM marketing it’s really cool that Will took the time to blog about our little meeting last year.

Spotted in mr rayne’s notes… loved this!

You. Can. Only. Type. One. Word.

Not as easy as you might think.

1. where is your cell phone? desk
2. Your boyfriend/girlfriend? single
3. Your hair? slick
4. Your mother? hugs
5. Your father? awesome
6. Your favourite thing? mustang
7. Your dream last night? none
8. Your favourite drink? bushmills
9. Your dream car?
10. The room you’re in?
12. Your fears? death
13. What do you want to be in 10 years? happy
14. Who did you hang out with last night? no-one
15. What you’re not good at? love
16. Muffins? blueberry
17. One of your wish list items?
18. Where you grew up? london
19. The last thing you did? interview
20. What are you wearing? pyjamas
21. what aren’t you wearing? hat
22. Your pet? computer
23. Your computer? pet
24. Your life? driven
25. Your mood? chipper
26. Missing?
27. What are you thinking about right now?
28. Your car?
29. Your work? internet
30. Your summer? travel
31. Your relationship status? single
32. Your favourite colour? red
33. When is the last time you laughed? morning
34. Last time you cried? march
35. School? eltham

Last year I put together some predictions when I first started my blog which I have removed. They turned out to be a bit of a liability at work, so this year I am not going to make that mistake again.

I do think two (non-controversial) things will be true in 2007:

1. Widgets/Gadgets will be a big revenue generator
2. Mobile use of the internet will soar but not be as huge as Battelle thinks

So I thought instead of detailed predictions I would share some of my resolutions for 07:

1. Do my GMAT and apply for MBA
2. Start the Green Card process
3. Run 10k twice a week for the first 8wks of the year (bit of a cheat I do this already)
4. Do weights training twice a week for the first 8wks of the year (haven’t done weights since I gave up rowing in 2005… this will hurt)
5. Drink water at work

Nothing too challenging on that list and in fact I have made progress on every front already. For me I am hoping 2007 will be more memorable than 2006. This may sound weird having moved to the US, bought my first car, been promoted, travelled 15 times on work, done a triathlon and run summits in San Jose and Tallinn but somehow 06 was lacking something. It was a year I didn’t get emotionally involved in and I feel I lived my life as a bit of a dispassionate observer… I don’t intend to do that in 2007.