August of 2007 Was Our Top-Month Ever

August Data: ats-august-2007.pdf

Last month, during July of 2007, a typically slow summer month for websites, we broke all previous records for AboveTopSecret.com traffic. And in the other traditionally slow summer month of August, we beat the pants off July.

Across all three primary sites, we had a total of 7,052,842 views of pages with content. AboveTopSecret.com accounted for 6.7 million of those page views.

On AboveTopSecret.com, we had 1.3 million visits, 760,000 of which where absolute unique users.

AboveTopSecret.com received 745,866 of our 760,000 unique visitors from more than 280,000 distinct keywords on 20 different search engines (nearly 85% of which was from Google).

In early August, we started our national radio advertising campaign on Coast To Coast AM, and by all indications, it's a contributing factor for our upswing in traffic. Before the advertising started, about 25% of all our visits came without a referrer (meaning the visitor bookmarked ATS or typed in the domain directly). In August, this number increased by 4.25%, or about 32,000 visitors.

Also in August, we began an online advertising campaign through Google AdSense. This resulted in 22,082 new visitors, more than 60% of which looked at two pages or more after clicking our ad (exceptionally good).

And content in August was simply amazing. A total of 219,273 distinct pages were viewed by visitors and members during the month of August. And for those who'd like to see what is the most popular content on ATS, this report: ats-august-2007-content.pdf shows the activity by page titles on our top-500 most popular pages (#500 still had 1,252 views in August).

For comparison, in August of 2006 we had 812,000 visits on all websites (451,000 absolute unique visitors) and just 4.2 million page views on ATS. And throughout all of 2006, August was our slowest month (Though January and February we close).

And for those of you who are true numbers-geeks, here's a look at our progress for 2007 in this report: ats-2007-ytd.pdf. You'll notice a steady upward climb in overall visitors, 4.7 million absolute unique visitors on the year, and more than 44 million page-views. -whew-

Looks like the business plan is bearing fruit.

Wanna bet September will beat those numbers by a wide margin?
.

Fantastic.

Is ATS continuing the AdWords campaign this month also?

Originally posted by Umbrax
Is ATS continuing the AdWords campaign this month also?

Yup. Though for now we're focusing our meager budget only on 9/11 and UFO-related keywords.

Originally posted by Gools
Wanna bet September will beat those numbers by a wide margin?

Heh... just six-and-a-half days into September, we're beating our fist seven days in August.

It's amazing how fast this place has grown.

I was looking through the "Introduction" forum to say Hi! to some new people, and I had noticed a lot of posts from new members.
I had no idea that so many people visit this site though.

This sure says something about the quality of the site, and the content posted by the members.

Good stuff

IT'S A CIA PLOTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!

oops. sorry.
wrong thread.

September does seem like it will be very busy...new record..

Who's On - There are 314 registered members and 2,059 guests browsing AboveTopSecret.com domains, with 73 guests loading pages right now.

[edit on 6/9/2007 by enjoies05]

Originally posted by enjoies05
and 2,059 guests browsing AboveTopSecret.com domains, with 73 guests loading pages right now

Yikes...

And that guest-tracking is now very accurate... those are absolute unique guests with no search engine spiders mixed in... and the "guests loading pages right now" portion is the number of guests who click a page in the past 15 seconds.

Someone told me just yesterday morning that ATS would never purchase top notch content, let alone consider buying the rights on a project that is related to the site.

Moments later I had to laugh when management distributed a message that this very thing was going to start happening very soon.

'Thinking small', staying safe and inside the 'box' just isn't the ATS way in my opinion..

I can't imagine ATS passing up even small, but highly interesting opportunities, should they present themselves.

It was particularly satisfying to see today that ATS has opened up a toll-free number, at which 'business ideas' can be discussed.

They told me "ATS is primarily a Conspiracy board. They'd have no interest in your ideas, let alone looking at a cool science oriented project."

Probably so, but it won't hurt to try. (At the very least, doing a cool project is its own reward.)

(sticks out tongue and blows virtual raspberry).



[edit on 6-9-2007 by Badge01]

You guys should send me some ATS sticker logos, I'll post them everywhere.

I just tried to get the pdf files, and ended up with small files containing a html page telling me it was 403 forbidden to access them. Anyone else get this?

Originally posted by Badge01
They told me "ATS is primarily a Conspiracy board. They'd have no interest in your ideas, let alone looking at a cool science oriented project."

Well... they are very wrong indeed!

ATS is built upon ideas; the ideas of guests, the ideas of members, the ideas of staff. That is what makes ATS such a great place to take part in online discussion, we evolve FOR the visitors.

As for science projects, I think our very first one happened to be a member suggestion, SETI@home, many years ago. Someone suggested ATS should become involved, so we started our own collaborative data-crunching team.

Well, thanks for the clarification Simon.

The comment was probably more off-the-cuff than serious, and maybe they were just feeling a bit negative that day, or making a comment more about me than ATS.

Thanks for taking the time to comment; again I don't want to mis-characterize what was said - it was just a casual comment, thus my light-hearted razzing above.

Have a great day!

congrats! This is good news, along with the announcement of premium membership!

Originally posted by scientist
along with the announcement of premium membership!

There's no "premium membership"... not now, not ever. All are equal.

hell yea^^ we got so much ufo reports,and with the declarations that aliens exist,and much more its just a big step forward to denying ignorance^^

Yes indeed - the growth here has been phenomenal. I can see that just from the time I used to be a lurker (pre-member days) as well as the time since.

Actually, reading this thread, I'm wondering whatever happened to the ATS Newsletter. I used to regularly get an email and I liked looking at the summations. Does it still exist? Could I have accidentally unsubscribed? I always check my spam folder so I know it does not go there and, of course, I would have identified it as not being spam.

Originally posted by trek315
I'm wondering whatever happened to the ATS Newsletter.

You can subscribe on our site home page, or here: ATS Newsletter Subscription

It's been going out every Saturday for some time now.