601 not out

[John Hill]

Well done Steve did think you would make 600 before the new year but not to be. Just shows what a great site this is, thanks for all your work and efforts. Next milestone has got to be 1000 by lets say mid year 30.06.04 What do you think ??
Enjoy your holiday I know you are off soon lucky s**.

[Steve Wooler]

Hi John

Yes, I had my eye on that and wondered if we would make it. With one to go, I was almost tempted to create a dummy account, but the system would have spotted that an account was already in use at my IP address and started the “manipulator” bells ringing.

Being realistic, I would say 1000 by the end of 2004. Although traffic has continued to rise, we have suffered a major hit in terms of the number of new readers since the end of November. We normally average 2 new accounts a day, whereas it's now less than one. Google – who directly or indirectly handle nearly three-quarters of all Internet searches – introduced some new anti-spam measure in late November. They screwed up and virtually every professionally designed site was kicked out of the listings. They quickly realised their mistake and started correcting things, but the travel sector has still not been fully corrected. This has had a major effect on attracting new readers.

As a matter of interest, myTobago logged more unique readers than visitors landing on the island in 2003 – almost one IP address per head of population on the island. We served up 1.25 million web pages during a total of 230,000 Visitor Sessions. It’s very rewarding and makes the effort worthwhile when you find such a high repeat readership.

All the best for 2004.