Alexa - Tag Archive

A review of our progress four months in

25 Replies Christopher Roberts

Today Technology Blogger has been live for 4 months – or 17 weeks and 3 days if you want to look at it like that.

Now after the first two weeks of being on the net, I wrote an article about what we had achieved as a community. Today I am going to do the same, but 17 (and a bit) weeks in, just so you can get a sense of scale as to the amazing feats that we have achieved.

Technology Bloggers LogoAs of today, the 13th of August 2011:

  • Our 15 writers have posted 65 articles
  • Our 120 commenters have posted 788 comments
  • We have tweeted 68 tweets to our 24 Twitter followers
  • We have posted 45 status updates to the 11 people who like us on Facebook
  • Our homepage has been awarded a Google PageRank of 3
  • Our Alexa traffic rank is 165,351
  • A fantastic community blog, which everyone should be proud to be a part of!

Take a look at our Google Analytics, (below) to see the true scale of the growth our blog traffic has had!

Technology Bloggers Google Analytics Graph (13/04/11-13/08/11)

Technology Bloggers traffic stats from the 13th of April 2011 to the 13th of August 2011

How have we achieved all this?

I have written a series on how to be a successful blogger, telling you what I have done that has helped the blog be a success, but I couldn’t have done this on my own.

The real answer is you guys! If you have written for us, commented on our content or even just read some of our stuff, it’s thanks to you that we have achieved what we have.

The best bit!

Great, we have achieved all this, but so what? Well I feel like I have gained a lot from the blog in this short amount of time, so I hope you have to, but remember we are a dofollow blog with great content, so everyone benefits! Read | Contribute | Benefit – it’s there for a reason 🙂

Readers gain knowledge and know-how from our content and others comments comments. Readers who also choose to comment benefit from the fantastic community we have and dofollow links. Writers benefit so much too: experience; exposure to a massive audience; dofollow links to their site; highly valuable, quality comments on their work; potentially AdSense earnings, etc.

The future…

Well done to all, we should be very pleased with our achievements, but I see this as just the beginning.

We have grown at such a rate in such a short space of time, I can’t see any reason why in a year or two we could have the likes of TechCrunch, Engadget and Mashable quaking in their boots!

Keep up the great work everyone 🙂

Christopher.

How do social media sites make their money?

23 Replies Christopher Roberts

Facebook has an Alexa traffic ranking of 2. Not a very big number is it? If you have never heard of Alexa before, you may think that that isn’t very good, but what it actually means is that it is the second most visited site on the net – the first being Google.com.


Twitter has and Alexa rank of 9, LinkedIn has a rank of 16, Flickr 32 – the list goes on.

This means that these sites need some serious server power to handle the millions upon millions of visitors they get each day. The problem is servers are extremely expensive to buy and run, due to them needing to be kept cool and have a super fast internet connection, both download and upload.

So how do social media sites run if it is so costly? Where do they make their money? How does Facebook make it’s money? How does Twitter make money? How do LinkedIn, Foursquare, Twitter, Bebo, Flickr, Myspace etc. all make their owners billions?

It’s complicated…

Unfortunately I cannot provide you with a hard and fast answer which applies to each social media site, as they all use different methods, but what I can do is tell you how individual sites like Facebook and Twitter make their money.

How does Facebook make money?

On Facebook there are adverts, you may have noticed them at the side of some of the pages. Often they are very well designed to blend in with the theme of the site, so that you almost think that they are just more recommended pages.

Facebook's LogoThese adverts will be potentially get hundreds of millions of views each day. This probably means that they cost a fair bit to buy, so ‘the Facebook Team’ will be cashing in big time on them.

So Facebook make their money through advertising, right? Well actually only some of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising. The exact figures are only known by a select few, but I would estimate that less than half of Facebooks revenue comes from it’s adverts. So where does the rest come from?

Facebook credits.

Since Facebook introduced it’s credit scheme last year, a whole host of new applications and offers have sprung up, all giving you the option of using Facebook credits to provide a service (e.g. watch movies on the site) or improve an experience (e.g. level up faster in a Zynga game).

Facebook currently takes 30% of the money spent on credits for itself, and at just over £2 for a movie or 25 ‘farm cash’ that doesn’t really seem that much.

However, with over half a billion registered users, if each user buys just 50 credits (around the price of one movie – £2 ish) a year, assuming the 30% cut Facebook gets, it could be turning over almost £1 and a half billion each year, on credits alone!

With over 400 games and apps where users can go and spend their money, Facebook are sure to be gaining a lot of cash via their credit scheme!

Facebook has recently been valued at a figure of somewhere around £30 billion ($50 billion) but in the future, who knows how high this figure could climb!

How does Twitter make money?

Twitter has no ads, so how does it make it’s money? Twitter is a microblogging platform which many users use from their mobile phones. Twitter charges users who update their feed via mobile, and it generates an awful lot of money through this.


Twitter's Logo

Despite it costing mere pence per transaction, often users will update their feed mutiple times each day. Millions of users posting millions of updates, many from mobile devices, every day is why Twitter is now valued at almost £5 billion.

Twitter is still a multibillion pound firm in the making, as I am sure it has may more money making schemes and pans up it’s sleeve ready to launch in the near future.

Other sites

How do Foursquare make their money? Well a lot of it comes from their recent deal with American Express, in which I believe it is making around the same amount as Facebook per transaction, although it doesn’t have the same sized member base that Facebook has.

Many other sites like Flickr and Bebo currently don’t appear to be making any money, as their founders set out with a goal of improving the web, not making money. However in years to come no doubt these sites too will become as successful and profitable as Facebook and Twitter, that is of course if we don’t all just switch to using the two giants: Facebook and Twitter!

Look what WE have achieved!

16 Replies Christopher Roberts

Wow… two weeks ago today, Technology Bloggers didn’t exist. The blog was in the final stages of preparation, I was tweaking the last few settings, and checking the wording of articles.

Two weeks ago, the blog looked like this

Technology Bloggers Launch

Technology Bloggers hours before it's launch

Basically, 14 day’s ago, this blog didn’t exist. Two weeks on, I have been blown away by what we have managed to achieve.

When most blogs start up, it usually takes a good few months to get the ball fully rolling, establish a good base of commenters and to fully populate the archives with posts from many different authors.

Technology Bloggers, my blog, your blog, our blog has done it in just two weeks.

So what has been achieved?

  • 14 unique, quality articles have been written, by 4 fantastic authors
  • Over 85 comments from 22 different commenters
  • 2 pingback from 2 different blogs
  • 15 user accounts created, many of which are now getting to work on new content for the blog
  • An Alexa traffic rank of 1,400,516516, meaning that it is in the top 1,400,516516 of websites on the internet, just 2 weeks after its launch!

How on earth have we achieved this?

As a member of the admin team, I have done a few things which I believe have massively increased the traffic, encouraged people to comment, and attracted guest authors.

What are those things? Well, that’s another post! I hope to ‘reveal all’ in the very near future, so stay tuned!