The site shoudl hopefully feel somewhat faster as we now have more bandwidth.

Slowness at this point would be related to CPU resources.

One of the nice things about that little Hitbox thingy at the bottom of the pages is that it is able to use cookies to determine how many unique visitors this site receives as opposed to the more generic and inflated "user sessions".

In August, WinCustomize climbed to over 1 million unique visitors for the first time. Think about that a MILLION different people visited the site. It's still a far cry from say Yahoo that gets something like 30 million unique people on per month. But then again, we're not a search engine. Skinning has gone mainstream.

And the results are breath taking. Take a look at some of the skins that came out (and this is just a quick look):

Sportsman (Alexandrie): https://www.wincustomize.com/library2/Alexandrie/wb/sportsman.jpg

Alien Mind (APB): https://www.wincustomize.com/library2/APB/wb/ss_AlienMind.jpg

Dynamo (Aleksyandr): https://www.wincustomize.com/library2/Aleksyandr/wb/Dynamo.jpg

There's a hard core base of around 50,000 people who visit the site every day with another 50,000 who visit the site a few times per week.

Most of them are using Windows XP.

Referral wise, excluding search engines Stardock represented 82% of referrals. The other skin sites (deviantART, Deskmod, ArtUpRoar, Skinbase, etc.) accounted for 2%.

Other community sites such as Neowin, Betanews, TweakXP, ICQPlus, and others accounted for 7%. 9% of referrals came from other sources (like TechTV, Avault, etc).

While it's obviously been a good summer for Stardock's apps, it's been a good summer for Litestep, Winamp, Windows Media Player and even PocketPC apps like Dashboard (Snoopsoft is now the #2 NON-SD referral).

Site-wise the age old problems still remain - bandwidth and CPU resources. The bandwidth problem is being taken care of thanks to a deal worked out with Betanews where we're leasing some of their bandwidth. We'll now be able to fulfill one of our long term goals of being able to provide backup to skin authors - we keep 2 copies of a skin in real time so if one server goes down, the skin is on another server still and we can pick and choose which server to download from based on bandwidth availability.

But it's actually CPU that's most problematic right now. Barring clustering (easier on paper than in reality), when you have several hundred people on the site at the same time, it creates strains on the servers. We're working on distributing this out more but it'll take time.

Thankfully we're able to even do this because of the early success of the new WinCustomize subscriptions. Thank you to everyone who has purchased one! Feel free to get one at https://www.wincustomize.com/store.asp

As we move towards Fall things wil likely pick up further. Lots of exciting things coming up in terms of new software.

The first WinCustomize subscriber premium suite ought to be ready in the next few weeks along with premium Icon sets and WindowBlinds visual styles which we think will not only help the site but help skin authors justify the time they put into this stuff (which in turn will create even more skins and themes for users to freely download).

Have fun!

August broke the million unique people visiting the site mark for the first time.

Using hitbox, we can tell how many unique individuals actually visit the site (as opposed to user sessions which is always much higher).

In August we broke the 1 million mark.

And there's a solid 40,000 or so who visited the site several times per day.

I've been writing a series of articles for Avault (www.avault.com) about how do websites make money in the post dot-com world. I was curious as to what you guys think websites can or should do.

Here's what I've found so far:

Ways websites can make money:

1) Advertising. The tried and true way just doesn't pay enough anymore. Even if you put a bunch of annoying pop-up ads, they'll not likely pay for your site unless your bandwidth use is miniscule and it's run by volunteers.

2) Donations. This can work but at a price - your users will basically expect to own your soul as Kuro5hin.org discovered. And had to go non-profit to do it.

3) Selling "stuff". This can help but is often (in my limited experience) more trouble than it's worth.

The article I juts finished is about website subscriptions. I actually think this could be the wave of the future but only when done correctly.

Rules that subscription sites need to follow:

a) Target core users (Which requires identifying what core users do on your site) not casual users.

Similar to (a), don't limit your site in any way that annoys casual users. The basic site should do what it does very well.

c) Don't sell the site's content (even if you make it). The subscription should be about making it more convenient or faster to access that content.

d) Don't get greedy, charge just what you need to pay for the site plus a reasonable profit. This means you will want to seriously know how much the
site really costs. Too many early subscriptions cost ridiculous amounts.

I think when put together some sites will be able to pay their bills. But I think the jury is out whether these methods will provide a generally viable business model.

What do you think?

This article at WebmasterMac comopares MacOS X and Windows XP. The conclusions you can largely ignore since many of matters of taste and the pro-Mac bias is considerable. But it is useful to see the two compared head to head in features and usability.

What do you think?

65% of our users who responded to the OS in use poll answered that they use Windows XP.

16% said Windows 2000 giving the two a combined total of 81%!

Given that these two OSes are only in use by a minority of users in the general public, it is safe to assume that people who are into customizing their computers are much more likely to have Windows XP.

Now, what is the reason for this? I can think of two basic reasons:

1) People into customization simply tend to have the latest/greatest version of Windows. The only problem with this assumption is that our other poll on hardware showed that most people on this site don't have the latest/greatest hardware.

2) That people who try out customization software like WindowBlinds, DesktopX, Winamp, etc. tend to have a much better experience with it if they're running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. That is, people who run Windows 98Frogboy are much more likely to have these customizing programs perform less than optimal and hence they don't continue to use them whereas WinXP/2K users have good experiences with them and end up sticking to them.

Regardless of the reason, Windows XP really seems to have boosted the skinning movement. This month may be WinCustomize's best month ever in traffic (it's going to be very close).

Okay, in theory if we wanted to have some sort of show/party for the community, where would be the ideal place?

This past weekend, the Lockergnome people had "Gnomedex" which I thought was a pretty good idea. The only downside is that it was in Iowa which means it's somewhat expensive to fly there and out of the way for just about everyone (though Karmagirl went!).

So if you were in charge of it, where would you want to have it?

I was looking at the latest MacOS screenshots and realized that why should only Bill Gates and Steve jobs have all the fun?

What if we had a little contest to let people mock up what their dream desktop OS would be. It wouldn't have to use any existing software, it would be a total mockup of if you had the power to create the perfect operating system, what would it be like?

To the winners, we can see what developers in the community (including Stardock or whoever else) might be interested in trying to turn that person's vision into a reality?

What do you think?

These days when I surf the net, if I visit a pretty busy site I'm increasingly faced with tons of banner ads, pop up ads, and other stuff that slows my visit down.

WinCustomize has no pop up ads.
It has just one banner ad at the top and not even that if you're an apprentice on up or a subscriber.

And the 100 megabyte limit?

Here's where statistics become interesting:

In the past year, roughly 10 million unique people visited the site.

Roughly 12,000 people total have downloaded over 100 megabytes and a significant percentage of them are customers or people with apprentice access or up.

12,000 people eout of 10 million is 0.1%. And since it's a lot less than 12,000 that are actually affected, it's therefore less than 0.1%.

So in effect, WinCustomize is a pretty free browsing experience for over 99.9% of the yearly visitors.

Consider the path skinz.org has taken (http://www.skinz.org) -- seriously, check it out right now. Nothing wrong with their approach IMO, it's just a different one. I would perosnally rather visit a site with as little ads and no pop-ups as possible and have that site focus on just the <0.1% of the users who are using a lot of the resources.

Different sites try different things. They all have costs they have to pay. But I thought a look at the statistics and sharing them with you might provide a different way of looking at things.

In the future, if someone wants to just link to this here's where I've posted this article:

http://draginol.stardock.com/Articles/Thereisnosuchthingsasafre.html


More and more often, users are finding that their favorite websites are now starting to ask them to contribute something back. It doesn't take a long time for some of these users to become offended and complain. Of course, they don't just come out and tell the truth "Look, I'm just a cheap leech and I want everything for free..." No, they try to hide their cheapness behind athe guise of moral outrage.

This faux moral outrage differs from site to site. But it usually involves the person who wants unlimited use of the site without contributing anything back claiming that the people running the site are "greedy".

I am an administrator on WinCustomize.com. It's a skin site where many of the most talented graphics designers from around the world submit their work. Their skins and themes and icons and wallpapers are then downloaded by users. The site is owned by Stardock and the most popular libraries on the site are for Stardock's software. The only thing that makes the site even remotely possible to have up is that a group of very generous hardworking volunteers from the "skinning" community donate their time to run the site. These volunteers are made up of by some of the top graphics designers around. So in essence, the site is actually run by the best and brightest of the community and Stardock pretty much takes a back seat and pays for the bandwidth and the programming.

Even still, the site costs quite a bit of money per year. Our ISP, MCI Worldcom (don't get me started) charges around $400 per megabit and we have 20 megabits in use ($8000 per month). The site also costs us roughly $50,000 per year in salaries and equipment to maintain the site. Or in other words, the site costs roughly $150,000 per year.

Stardock's actually in an unusual situation because it makes the software the most of the users of the site are using.. Because its software is sold directly, it therefore knows which users have purchased the software and which ones have not. As the site began to push up against that 20 megabit limit, something had to be done. The site was simply costing too much per year. So Stardock did some analysis on how that bandwidth was used:

It turned out that while the site got millions of visits each month, the bandwidth was consumed mostly by a tiny percentage of those users. It turned out that over 12,000 people had downloaded over 100 megabytes. Nothing wrong with that until it was discovered that of those 12,000, only a couple thousand of them had actually purchased the software that they were downloading the skins for.

In short, a large percentage of the bandwidth was being used by warez users essentially.

Contrary to what some may believe, no website is free. Someone has to pay for it. WinCustomize is paid for by Stardock but who pays Stardock? The individuals who purchase Object Desktop, WindowBlinds, DesktopX, etc.

So if WinCustomize was to keep going, Stardock either had to raise the prices on its software to help pay for the non-contributing users or it had to find ways to get those bandwidth intensive users to contribute something back or go away (note: getting these people to simply go away is an acceptable result - many users are under the mistaken belief that they do a site a favor simply by visiting).

Throwing pop up ads and other nonsense at its users was not an acceptable solution. The crass commercialism of the Internet was not going to be on WinCustomize (who doesn't hate those pop up ads?). Stardock decided it was not fair to force its customers to indefinitely subsidize those who were just taking and not giving anything back to the community in return.

So the solution WinCustomize came up with was relatively straight forward:

Once a user downloaded 100 megabytes of stuff, they had to do one of the following:

a) Buy a WinCustomize subscription ($20 for 2 years - 80 cents per month). They get a bunch of really cool goodies along with unlimited downloads.

OR

Register the warez/shareware version of the software they were downloading those skins, themes, icons for.

OR

c) Start contributing to the site by helping users on the message boards, submitting news on relevant things, and generally being a positive presence via written activity.

OR

d) Start making skins, icons, themes, whatever to begin contributing something back to the community.

Any one of those 4 things would do the job.

At the end of the day, someone has to pay that $150,000 that the site costs to have per year. For the past year, it's been people who register Object Desktop or one of its components. A user who thinks it's unfair that they have to do something in order to keep downloading stuff forever should ask themselves if it's fair that someone else has to pay for the bandwidth they're consuming. Because there's no such thing as a free website.