Here’s our FIRST traffic/growth report for the fluffy-seme project. What follows covers from the site’s formal launch March 20th 2009 to the September 21th 2009. Generally we plan to do these reports more often than every 6 months (most likely they will be done by quarter so every 3 months) but since this is the first report and traffic is usually not strong in the beginning, we felt it better to wait to give a more accurate picture of a growth patterns.
In August we had the pilot run of HyperLocal, a story scavenger hunt game, and in July we started publishing Split-Self. So for August and July we worked very aggressively on our promotion and site activity, but come September we were pretty burned out. So while the site continued to update as usual, a lot of the promotional activities stopped. As a result stats for the month of September serve as a nice control group. What does fluffy-seme’s traffic pull look like if we do absolutely nothing?
So, as you can see our current traffic is just below 200 pages views a day with visitors hitting 5 pages each. This is with NO advertising and NO promotion done at all.
Here’s a look at August when we were working hard at promoting what was going on. When we put a little effort into it pageviews hover around 400 a day with closer to 4 pages per visitor per day
Well okay 400 pageviews per day is far far from revolutionary, but it’s decent for a website that’s only been really up and running for 6 months. Let’s look at how traffic has grown over time:
You can see here a general trend towards more and more traffic over time. Still modest all things considered, but a stable path of growth.
Well you might be saying to yourself now, traffic is one thing but there’s junk traffic and then there’s quality traffic. So let’s look at the stats for returning visitors side by side
You can see for yourself, returning visitors are growing at a rate that echoes the general growth of traffic to fluffy-seme as a whole.
How are we going to continue to grow?
For us the big thorn in our side continues to be community. This is especially vexing considering that community is a key foundation of our business model (read: how we are going to make money), but we believe that this problem is solvable. There has been a slow but steady growth in the use of the community functions of the site, and will continue to be. Basically we just have to continue to work hard until we eventually reach the tipping point
Admin, President and all around person in-charge of fluffy-seme. Doesn't like writing bios, but likes writing pretty much everything else. Can be reached at seme@fluffy-seme.net 
