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Published on Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston (/cms)

Management Update 8

By David Roffey
Created 14/06/2006 - 13:25

Site statistics

Site traffic measures in May were all around 15% up on April, ie back to March levels and above, with more than 14,000 unique visitors to the site. We published 38 new posts in May, down from 52 in April, and 1413 comments, up from 1029 in April. We didn’t publish 35 abusive, content-free or incomprehensible comments: total intended for publication and not published 35/1448=2.4%.

405 people have registered to submit comments, up from 381 at the end of April. One asked to be de-registered and removed: doing this would remove all of their comments from the site, which is against our general view that, once published, we don't delete things - I'd be interested in people's views on this as a practice and principle.

Finances

Income in May fell to only $1667 in donations, versus expenditure of $3125. This hasn't picked up in June, so we have terminated the contracts with Project Syndicate for content, and with Westpac WebAdvantage for credit card merchant services. We have also been unable to pay Hamish since mid-May, and this is not likely to change unless donation volume picks up a lot.

Going forward, this leaves us with essentially no ongoing costs, but also with no guaranteed content and only volunteer editors (including Hamish), so the quality of what appears here will be up to you out there writing and submitting stuff, and there will continue to be days and times when publication speed will suffer. To repeat what has been said many times before, we will publish almost any coherent opinion piece that has researched backing for any contentious claims, subject to the Editorial Policy [0].

PS (P-S): Since drafting this, Project Syndicate have come back with an offer to continue supplying articles at a lower cost than the current US$750 per month. We'd be interested in the views of readers on whether we should take this up ...

David Roffey,
Managing Director,
Webdiary P/L


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