Keeping track of every Jaguar E-Type, with your help.
xkedata > blog > 2008 > 11

If I remember and can muster the energy, I’ll post a here-is-the-past-30-days Google Analytics report on the blog every once in awhile. I have no idea how this compares to other similar enthusiast sites. We’re not all that extensively linked and I currently exclude search bots from the car pages, which eliminates tens of thousands of pages from search indexes.

Beware of the “totals” row, as the unique visitor count is probably artificially inflated as folks tend to go from site-to-site via the menu at upper right (which, by the way, is an excellent way of seeing the total cars and photos on the various sites, it’s always up-to-date).

I threw out the percentage increase for the Coventry Racers site when calculating that totals column, as it’s an anomaly, having just launched within this last month. The XJ6 site is similarly fresh, though from the activity on it I expect it awaits a fate similar to the relatively moribund XJS site.

As you may have seen, the 2009 Calendars are now available. I encourage you to check them out and buy one if you enjoy the site. I guess with the economy in the crapper it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that sales are far slower than last year…but hopefully things will pick up.

One reason the slow sales is bothersome is that most sales then come from people whose cars are featured, which feels fairly sleazy to me–like I’m one of those guys who takes a snap of people at a tourist attraction and then tries to sell it to them. “Hey, your car is in the calendar…oh, by the way, would you like to buy one?”

“Slow” is not a euphemism; last year I sold about 150 calendars total, so to slow from that…would make them much like the “donation” button. One person per year has clicked that–seven donations in seven years. That said, I really do appreciate those who have donated, you have my undying gratitude. (I hope jag-lovers does better than this!)

According to a friend in the know, the only real way to raise funds from something other than advertising is to either

1. Have a beg-a-thon every once in awhile, or
2. Or charge something in exchange for “premiums”

The calendars are about as close to a beg-a-thon as I’m comfortable getting at the moment, and I have no idea what would constitute premium content on these sites. Mostly naked women lounging on vintage Jaguars–for a price? Throwing lots of ad screens for dubious products between every page and photo which you could remove by paying a fee? The former sounds good, but I don’t really have a stock of mostly-naked women, or working vintage Jaguars, for that matter. The latter sounds…less than ideal.