A Time of Magic

I’ve been reviewing the year on year performance of the various websites in my little stable and it looks like I might as well have spent the money on a party than spend it on promoting my sites.

For the third year in a row, the traffic on the sites that I keep an eye on has tripled year on year. That’s counting both the sites that I very actively promoted around this time last year and those that I just allowed to carry on their merry way. Even when you compare those that I spent a lot on vs those I spent next to nothing on the stats seem to tell the same story.

As an example, I put quite a bit of effort (although not much actual cash) into promoting my main blog yet I find that this one is steets ahead of it with next to no effort expended on promotion. Typically on Reuters this blog gets about 50% more readers than the main one for example.

Then, of course, there’s the google fiasco where they hammered a large number of minor league blogs for carrying sponsored posts yet ignored exactly the same practice for the big league sites who were doing exactly the same thing. As it happens, that passed me by pretty much unscathed aside from one blog written by Wendy who’s less than pleased about that to put it mildly. Still, it has me wondering about all the money I spent to get my sites submitted to various directories. Was it all wasted? To be sure those sites did see a jump in traffic starting shortly after each round of promotion but as we come into 2008 I’m seeing exactly the same jump and this time around I’ve not ran the promotion.

Ironically, one of the sites which I did spend a fair bit to promote and which seems to deserve a better following just didn’t shift at all. A comparable site to it launched in the summer is already streets ahead of it.

I suspect that you need to either spend a little money or put a lot of effort into the initial promotion but, unless you’re in the really big league, I don’t know that it’s worthwhile spending more than, say, $50 now and that only to put a new site on the map.

Actually, what’s more surprising is how few of the ancient bridges are still around.

Building bridges was a trial and error process until relatively recently. The designs that survived were worked out through eliminating many designs that weren’t up to the job and fell down. This isn’t entirely a recent phenomena either as the bridge at Tacoma illustrates.

Obviously small bridges weren’t really a problem. Throw a log over a river and it’s not going to collapse under you. It’s the larger constructions that are the problem as they involve all kinds of structural stresses that just weren’t well understood until quite recently. Hence, you don’t see anything like the number of Roman bridges as you might expect to see if you thought about it for a while. After all, their roads went pretty much directly from A to B so they would have crossed numerous rivers along the way yet few of those bridges remain.

Ah, but they’d have been worn out and collapsed by now. Yes, some of them would have of course but the Romans built pretty chunky artifacts as those which remain attest to so there should have been a whole lot more of them still around. Obviously, they’d have needed some repairs after 2000 odd years but you still see substantial buildings around for that length of time.

If you book a long-distance flight then chances are you’ll find that the airline you’re actually flying on isn’t the airline that’s listed on your ticket. For instance, a flight from Barclona to Sydney on Lufthansa is, at best, only Lufthansa from Barcelona to Frankfurt and from there it’ll be on Singapore Airlines. Why?

The reasons for this go way back into the past when there were “national airlines” and bilateral arrangements were negotiated on their behalf by the various governments. For example, at one time you could only fly between America and Britain on British Airways or American Airlines and that remained the case for many years which, of course, led to all of us paying much higher fares than we really needed to.

Within Europe many of these restrictions have been killed off by the European Commission who regard competition as a “good thing” and so it is. The discount airline Ryanair could never have gotten off the ground had the old-time restrictions remained in place. One effect of those restrictions was that, since it’s an Irish airline, it could only have flown between France and Ireland yet in many of the airports that it uses it flies from, say, France to Belgium, Germany, etc.

But what about code-sharing? Well, that exists to get around those old-time restrictions which also ruled out cross-border purchases of airlines. The relatively recent AirFrance/KLM merger could never have happened even 10 years earlier and even now it’s not possible for a foreign airline to buy any American owned airlines (so much for America promoting competition, eh?).

With code-sharing airlines are effectively able to operate as one without requiring to merge as such. Singapore Airlines would probably like to buy Lufthansa for its European routes but can’t do so at the moment so instead there’s code-sharing.