Asylum-ET Site Past, Present and future
I am wondering what is a typical amount of unsolicited commercial traffic for a website to receive. In the past I have viewed all this type of thing just bad overall but now I am thinking that may not be overly true for a few reasons. I am interested in hearing what others have to say about this.
For instance I now have this idea that you can possibly measure a websites popularity by the amount of what we will call “ham” that it receives. I mean why else would someone ham my blog other than they think it is going to get them something. So personally I do not understand what allot of viewers come here for. I totally understand my clients coming here to get information and even the band members and their followers but the latest waves of visitors have been in the thousands and have nothing to do with our original intent.
According to google our highest ranked page is for the elmer fudd search widgit that we have released. That does not surprise me any more but what does strike me as a bit odd is that according to statistics gathered by our site the most common is the sitemap parser for wordpress. That is a great plugin and so many are using it. Total downloads for all versions of it is approaching 800 now.
Here lies the one issue though. Once again I must mention the site structure. Many things are going on here. It is all for the love of entertainment and wanting to continue to provide service as such but the viewer base majority is not here for entertainment so the shift is looking like it is going to be a necessity. We want to continue to provide our original users the same services we have always and now want to include our latest guests and their interests as well.
Back to the issue of how much ham is to much. Asylum Entertainment has been running the website since 2005. The first archive that can be found is Sep 24, 2005. Previous to that it went by the name highvoltageaudio which was the name of the disc jockie service asylum entertainment provided. The earliest archives that can be found of that are Mar 21, 2005 and May 27, 2005.
Since that time we have seen very little for traffic especially when it comes to hamers. Now mid last year we see a good increase in traffic. We hit a max of sum eight hundred thousand hits in a month and never did we see ham. That was surprising at first but since then we have dwarfed that. We now are seeing an average of 100+ ham per day. Our statistics have shown a great increase in viewers though. Take a look at the last three months stats.
Even though that does not directly effect us as for our time anymore since we have ham protection it does however cost us in bandwidth and it taxes the service we use to stop ham and we like them. We will monitor it a bit longer and then make a decision if further steps are needed to stop the ham abuse.