• 05/12/2012 - ArtistServer Version 2 on the Horizon
• 05/31/2009 - 18 More Social Sites Added to SocialNetwork.in
• 05/25/2009 - Run Your Own Remix or Music Project at ArtistServer.com
• 05/22/2009 - AudioBoo.fm and YouNoodle.com Added to SocialNetwork.in
• 05/06/2009 - mp3tunes.com - no option to close your account
• 03/17/2009 - How to run a Remix Project
• 09/28/2008 - My Lovely Wife Lou is Pregnant
• 12/14/2007 - ArtistServer News and a new site: FreeMusicLicensing.com
• 09/18/2007 - AritstServer and ToneThis Serve Up Indie Ringtones
• 09/11/2007 - Running LightTPD and PHP on Windows

Check this out!

According to current trends, ArtistServer.com is worth $545,000
Info on Current Trends: http://www.business2.com

Based on those numbers, and the stats I have from when the site took off in 2004, I estimate that by next summer, the value of ArtistServer will surpass $1 million (if the current value of unique visitors to a site sustains).

By the end of next year, it's value should hit the $2 million mark.

In 2004, we ended up with 750,000 unique visitors, and at that time, the value of unique visitor per month was $33. Multiply together, and you get what ElectronicScene.com was approximately worth in 2004: $2,062,500 (for those who do not know, ElectronicScene grew into ArtistServer.com).

Certainly, these are not 'true' numbers. The value of a unique visitor isn't something I personally feel you can put an exact dollar amount on. I'd feel better with a few numbers which represent the population better - or some other form of counting the unique visitors. For example, User A hits the site every day, User B hit's it once and never returns. Based on the system used to create the numbers above, those two users are worth the same. But as you can imagine, User A is worth far more than User B. In fact, User B may not be worth anything - just like a person surfing channels on the TV isn't worth anything to the channel they just viewed and clicked away from.

Not bad. :) Now, If I could just make a few dimes to cover the expenses at least.

For those thinking "hey, but Gideon displays ads on the site!" - I can tell you that the amount generated from the ads on ArtistServer does not even come close to covering the monthly costs in running the site. As of today, the ads only cover 12% of my expenses - that's an 88% loss every month. It's actually much higher than that if you add in the amount my sallary would be if I kept track of my hours. But hey, what's time? :)

Can You Trust the Numbers?



You ALWAYS have to be careful about Websites and the numbers they give you. All is not what it seems to be. :) For example - most sites will tell you about "hits" - that's not the correct item in your logs to refer to. What you want to know, is the Page Views and Unique Visitors. What is a "hit?" A Hit, is when you request a page, that's 1 hit - then inside the page are other files, like images, each image is a hit, each script is a hit, etc. So a single page view will often equal a dozen or more "hits." This means the numbers they are telling you are off by a factor of maybe 12 or more. Another issue with numbers and Websites, is that site's do not filter out requests by search engine spiders. So a site like ArtistServer, with so many artist and member sites, spiders will spend a long time crawling the site - adding more page views and hits to the log files... but these aren't users. I guarentee that 99.9% of the site stats you see on the Web are inflated by search spiders.

So, in conclusion, I do not personally believe in the current valuation model - it's not designed to reflect anything but raw numbers, and seems to favor the Websites being analyzed by inflating their value through oversimplifying the value of a unique visitor.