The COW seems slow. Is this good news or bad?

[Tim Wilson]

[Andy jackson] “People have lost all hope and faith in the business so I`m not surprised the cow is seeing the results.
“

As noted in my ridiculously long post, traffic in the COW is up 11% over this time last year. People who come are viewing more pages and staying longer than last year too.

tw

[Mark Suszko]

Tim I can tell you as an “O.G”. from Vidpro-L, it’s STILL insane. 🙂 It’s why I spend more time here.

[Andy Jackson]

Hi Tim

You just need to check the web statistics on alexa

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/creativecow.net#

Reach % Change
Yesterday 0.0123% -19.24% down
7 day 0.0147% +9% up
1 month 0.0150% -21.24% down
3 month 0.0194% -25.15% down

It would also be interesting to see how many views the forums actually get viewed per topic. There seems to be no way of finding out or am i missing something.

[Nick Griffin]

Andy-

Sorry about your circumstances and experiences but, while that may be the case for you and some others, there are a WHOLE BUNCH of us here who are NOT living your life. Negativity rarely results in success so perhaps you’ve created a self-fulfilling prophesy. Or, and forgive me for being blunt, perhaps the skills you were offering in the marketplace weren’t broad enough or deep enough to keep the digital amateurs from taking away your business. And/or, maybe your it was your sales skills.

Todd Terry put it best last month in a post which said:
I think a couple of the tricks to being successful in the production business are to 1) find an underserved or niche market, and 2) be hands-down better than anyone else.

The production business is not for everyone. Neither is self-employment. Sorry, but it’s not technology’s fault.

Again, forgive me for being blunt, but based on your recent posts I felt this needed to be said.

[Andy Jackson]

Nick

Thats okay.I understand and accept your comments and will take them onboard

Cheers Andy

[Tim Wilson]

We used to watch Alexa maybe five years ago, but the numbers got less and less accurate over time. C’mon man, it says our top search term is “Texturing a ball in Maya,” and the second is “Coloring a ball in Maya.” Ridiculous. We look at Alexa every year or so, and go back to ignoring them. The information isn’t worth the pixels it’s printed with.

Instead, I quoted the numbers from Google Analytics. Rather than work as Alexa does, by guessing the aggregated accuracy of a number of sources who are also guessing, Google DIRECTLY tracks everything that happens. Google tracks every click, every view, lines them up with every IP address, etc etc etc. — DIRECTLY, straight from our servers to theirs.

I could be reading you wrong — and I apologize if I am — but it appears that you’re predisposed to have a negative opinion of us right now. I’m 100% okay with that. Your opinion is as valid as anyone else’s, and I certainly have my own list of things that I don’t think we’re doing well enough. It’s probably longer than yours.

But the numbers are the numbers, and Alexa has no way to see our actual numbers at all. Google can, and does — taking every pageview, every click, every person, DIRECTLY into account, from our servers to theirs, no mediation, no guessing.

The fact is that you can see high traffic very plainly yourself if you look at COW forums that aren’t this one, which, as I mentioned, has perfectly understandable reasons for going down: the exact conversations that used to happen here, with some of the exact same people, have shifted elsewhere in the COW.

Again noting that our traffic typically goes down by hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors in the summer. It has happened in each of the last 12 years, with one exception, and ONLY one: when Apple was kind enough to release FCPX in June. LOL Now THAT was some increased summer traffic. Thanks again, guys! LOL Otherwise, we tend to bottom out around July 4, and start easing back up from there. This too has happened every year since we opened in 2001. But I don’t expect the traffic in this particular forum to go up in a huge way, for reasons I’ve mentioned. Although you’re helping with that right now. 🙂

Anyway, I’m very comfortable with the numbers I quoted. We put our money where our mouth is with them every day, too. If we made this stuff up, our advertisers would know in an instant, as they do their own internal tracking to compare to our claims. There’s simply no percentage for us in exaggerating AT ALL. We’d lose money and credibility with our partners that we could never get back. So we don’t exaggerate. AT ALL.

But I’m happy to let anyone else have the last word. Besides Alexa. LOL But this’ll be my own last word on it.

Peace,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Andy Jackson]

Hi Tim

Thanks for updating me on the google analytics.
You may think I have a negative opinion of the cow but that is not my intention.
I feel it is a fantastic place to recieve and offer advice within the industry.

My gripe is the production business itself which is nearly extinct.

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks for the clarification. 🙂

tw

[Andy Jackson]

Your very welcome tim 🙂

[Scott Cumbo]

I was a musician for close to 20 years and never got that hit song. Never got to the point that I could really live off of it. Dosen’t mean that it’s impossible, just means I failed.

There are a ton of people making a good living from video. The industry isn’t dead, but it is very, very competitive and not for everyone.

Scott Cumbo
Lead Editor
Bellator MMA/Spike TV