I decided that community color should have a press release (dagnabbit). The little hit counter I put on Salt Lake Sites just clicked passed a million. I figured that was as good as any to have a press release. Of course the counter is wildly inaccurate. Due to a programming glitch it missed about 6 months of activity, and it only shows the activity on the directory structure. Anyway here goes:
Community Color Press Release 12/9/2005: The Salt Lake Sites open directory officially passed the 1 million directory hit today. Salt Lake Sites in an open directory in the Community Color family of sites. The directory currently lists 4697 links to 4054 unique domains. The most popular categories on the site are Salt Lake Night Life, Salt Lake Radio and Shopping.
The second most popular directory in the family is Provo Utah dot US. This directory covers the Utah Valley area. It lists 1282 links to 1060 distinct domains. The most popular categories in Provo are crafts and apartments. Provo is a college town where people like to do crafty things. The Provo directory shows 254,000 hits. Missoula.ws shows 174,000 hits and gjct.com (Grand Junction) shows 155,000 hits. A new comer in the line up is Denver Color which past the 100,000 hit mark earlier this month.
The purpose of the Community Color family of sites is to promote local web development in the mountain west. The directory includes one of the most complete collections of links to local artists, cultural institutions and businesses in the area. The site allows free listings for all residents in the areas served by the directories. The entire Community Color directory structure averages 2700 hits a day.
NOTE, the directory is only one component of the site. In November, 2005, the Community Color Sites reported 49,638 sessions and 414,233 page views. The directory accounts for about 20% of the site's traffic.
The web sites are funded by a small number of clearly marked advertisers (affiliates). 2.7% of the links in Salt Lake Sites go to affiliated sites. 3.1% of the sites in Grand Junction go to affiliates, 3.3% of the sites in Missoula go to affiliates and 5.8% of the links in Provo go to affiliates.
Unfortunately, there is a very high turn over in local web sites. Salt Lake Sites has 4697 links. In the last three years, I’ve deleted 770 broken links. 14% of the total links have been removed! I greatly appreciate people who mark broken links. I apologize for the large number of broken links still on the directory...especially broken links that go to unsavory sites.
System wide, the community color family of sites lists 14181 links. 990 of the links go to "affiliates." I believe that this is a good balance. The take from the advertisers has been averaging about $650 a month. Hopefully the use of the directory will grow with time.
The entire directory structure shows over 2.37 million hits. This figure is actually an undercount. I have a tendency to delete data.
This concludes the press release. I have another one planned in about a month.
