freeg131: Philip Gamble

The following arrived in my account at the Game Maker Community a couple of days ago:

Thank you for taking the time to read this PM. I know this is random but, do you mind adding my website (theplaysource.com) in your affiliates sectoin [sic]. I’ve already linked back to My Gm Game. (If you want me to change the title just ask Thanks in advance

I replied stating that MyGMGames affiliation is managed through my Game Maker Affiliation Program. I don’t think the site is especially deserving of a text link - it has only been online for two months. None of my sites have sidebar text links to sites that are not mine and the only regular outlinks are in GameMaker blog.

I am pleased to see that this person has since joined GMA and has tested the promotional code but they are yet to place it on their website or upload a banner to represent their site.

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I was recently asked by one of my computing teachers if I knew somewhere were you could see how popular a particular website was. I recommended Alexa, easily manipulated, but probably the most widely known about site providing estimates of traffic stats.

Obviously the different traffic estimation sites use different techniques to calculate traffic data for websites, so some variation in their results should be expected.

Here is a quick look at the popularity of what is, under normal circumstances, my most popular site - GameMaker Blog.

Alexa - #438,208, however the week average is higher at 332,014.

Compete.com estimates the number of unique visitors to a domain per month. For April their figure for GameMaker Blog is 658. This figure is far too low. Even if we are just counting visitors to the blog itself, the figure should be closer to 3,000 and that is excluding the much larger number of people who see the site through the GameMaker Affiliation Service.

Quantcast is a site I found relatively recently a couple of months ago. Unlike the other sites Quantcast provides much more detailed information about visitors to particular websites, based on the number of monthly US unique visitors. They give GameMaker Blog, at the time of writing, a rank of 622,506.

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I’ve never really compiled a comparative list of all my monthly traffic stats, instead I tend to focus on one site at a time - but I figured it would be nice to see the relationship between the effort I put into maintaining sites and the amount of traffic they receive to see if my time could be better spent.

GameMaker Blog (blog only, NOT gma)
Unique visitors: 2,704
Pageviews: 9,760
Time spent on site: Lots - blogging, checking comments.

Aidy Boothroyd
Unique visitors: 1,737
Pageviews: 2,939
Time spent on site: Half an hour creating a soundboard.
Note: Normally traffic would be at much lower levels than this, however the soundboard was picked up by a couple of football forums resulting in a huge spike in traffic levels.

Stencyl
Unique visitors: 375
Pageviews: 660
Time spent on site: None.

freeg131
Unique Visitors: 202
Pageviews: 426
Time spent on site: Surprisingly little considering the number of blog posts made - a distant second behind GameMaker Blog.
Note: Traffic increased dramatically with the addition of this blog.

GameMaker.tv
Unique visitors: 125
Pageviews: 185
Time spent on site: None.

Cassiobury Park
Unique visitors: 83
Pageviews: 279
Time spent on site: None.

GameMaker Stream
Unique visitors: 56
Pageviews: 79
Time spent on site: None.

The site below was excluded from the above list because of its nature - serving ‘ads’ across many sites - most of them not mine.
Game Maker Affiliation Service
Unique visitors: 10,938
Pageviews: 70,810
Time spent on site: Very little. Fixed a chmod issue, otherwise just checking stats.

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My Game Maker Affiliation Service, a free banner exchange service for Game Maker related websites, has now delivered over 2 million ad impressions in less than a year since its May 2007 launch.

Banners in the system have been clicked almost 13,000 times giving an impressive Click-Through-Ratio of 0.63%. Browser, OS and country stats for surfers seeing ads served through the system can be found in this post at GameMaker Blog.

Until today there had been a recurring problem when members tried to upload banners to the service, however Tim (my host) has set up a cronjob which should rectify this issue.

The service does not show any sponsored ads on members sites, but allocates 0.9 credits to sites each time the show an advert, keeping back 10% of the potential credits. These credits can then be used to further advertise GameMaker Blog. In addition, when there are no available banners to serve, a banner promoting the service is shown.

I created the GMA both to help people who run Game Maker websites exchange relevant traffic and also to help spread awareness of GameMaker Blog. As such the service itself does not generate a profit.

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