FabulousEntertainment

Here’s the latest progress:

Fab Swingers has moved up another place, overtaking The Adult Hub. The Adult Hub (incorporating Dirty David) was one of the original swingers sites and one of the biggest, so it’s great to have moved passed them.

The gap with Swinging Heaven is narrowing, I guess that we presently have about 40% of their traffic, so there’s still a good way to go. It’s a wonderful study of a conventional marketing campaign with a reasonable amount of cash behind it verses a zero-budget, grass roots operation.

I’m tempted to remove the Page Rank from this chart, I might replace it with Google Trends for Websites information instead. Fab Swingers has been enjoying its best Google performance ever since the Page Rank dropped so it just really doesn’t seem to be that relevant anymore (having said that I probably should make an effort to boost it).

The recent technical changes to the site (see previous posts) seem to have removed our performance problems for now so once again we can focus on adding features and getting bigger.

I’ve left it a little late to do the rankings, but here they are at last:

There’s not that much news this time. Swinging Heaven has declined, Fab Swingers has moved up and there haven’t been any very dramatic changes.

The gap between Fab and Adult Hub has narrowed looking at the more recent data and you can see this graphically on Google Trends for Websites. Looking at users online Fab has 1016 right now verses 753 at the Hub and the Alexa weekly rankings show Fab well ahead so personally I think that we have already overtaken them but the stats have yet to catch up.

I was just taking a look at the Alexa page for The Adulthub and I noticed that they had recently had a big traffic spike - from Nigeria!

Right now, Alexa is reporting 21.8% of the Adulthub’s users from that country. We have also had an increase in attempted spam from Nigeria on our site however our blanket ban on Africa has been quite effective at keeping them under control. I guess that they are just going through a phase of targeting swingers sites.

But to have over 20% of site traffic from spammers is pretty bad and must be annoying a lot of their users.

I notice that Alexa have had quite a major change of their algorithms, instead of just using the Alexa Toolbar they are now using data from ISP’s which brings them into line with Hitwise, Compete.com and the other big players.

It’s great news for us because it’s really good to have more accurate rankings. The bad news though is that just after they introduced the change we took a dip! But overall it’s not really resulted in much of a change.

So our friends at Swinging Heaven continue to fall, The Adult Hub has also dropped slightly and Fab Swingers has risen slightly.

Meanwhile at the bottom of the table Dogging.co.uk has dropped quite a bit but the surprise has been Swing Fans which has dropped so far that it is heading for removal from the table.

I also had a quick look at members online earlier this evening, Fab Swingers and The Adult Hub were equal and Swinging Heaven had four times the number of members online (last time I did this check they were nearly seven times bigger).

The results from Google Analytics have also shown a pretty steady increase in members, page views and visits so overall I’m pretty happy with life!

It is two months to the day since the last site rankings so here we go again. I’ve made no change to the sites we’re tracking.

So on the face of it, the only major change has been that Fab Swingers has moved up one place in the table, passing Swing Fans. However if you look at the Alexa information Fab Swingers has been beating the Adult Hub for the past few weeks so as soon as that filters through into the three month average then we will see Fab Swingers move up another place.

It’s good to see Swinging Heaven resuming its gently decline. I am now pretty confident that Fab Swingers will finally overtake Swinging Heaven this year. This is partly because of the general trend in the Alexa rankings but it is also because Fab Swingers is now in sight of generating enough income for me to be able to quit my job and concentrate on it.

Not only that but there is also now a marketing budget (for the first time ever!) so we should be able to accelerate the growth of the site quite nicely.

Looking back at the table, there is quite a big gap between the top four and the middle bunch so I suspect that it will be nearer the end of the year before we move into that group. I also suspect that SDC (on the up slightly) will overtake Swinging Heaven (on the slide as usual) before we go past SH.

We’ve just had a whole bunch of new members from Local Swingers. I’m not completely sure why but LS have seriously annoyed their users, it sounds like they shut down a forum and banned some members. I’m not sure why.

There’s a post about it in our swingers forum.

It’s great news to see such a big group coming over to the site so quickly but it’s also a warning: if you piss off your users then it is incredibly easy for them to leave and go somewhere else.

Here are the latest swinger site rankings. This time I’ve removed UK Swingers and Swing2Us as both sites have now dropped too far in traffic. Their replacements are Dogging.co.uk and SwingFans which have been doing a lot better.

The biggest mover has been Fab Swingers, shifting from 128,952 to 71,436 which has been great progress for only two months.

Local Swingers has had a terrible time, when I first did these ranking they were at 29,790 so the fall to 98,504 has been a pretty steep decline. Although The Adult Hub has improved slightly over last time its 45,780 is also a terrible drop from the original 14,864.

Sex in the UK continues its incredible progress on the back of a huge PPC spend. Their UK Alexa ranking is an amazing 147 verses AdultFriendFinder’s 62 so it is quite possible that they may take the number 1 spot in the UK.

I’ve just been checking out Swing2Us and I noticed that the owner has changed from “Dean and Matty” to CyberMaxx. I went over to archive.org and the change happened between January 26th and February 2nd this year.

CyberMaxx is ran by Thomas Gapski, I’ve not been able to find much about him although he is mentioned in the German Internet World but unfortunately my German isn’t great. I think I can work out what pornografie means though! If you do understand please add a comment to this post with some details of what it says.

I am slightly surprised though that they’ve had such a bad year in terms of traffic and there doesn’t seem to have been any investment in the site (still lots of broken links, etc). I would’ve thought that if you were going to buy the site then you would do something with it. Maybe they just picked it up very cheap?

As I’ve got lots of things to do this evening I thought I’d procrastinate by re-doing the check of members online which I last did in October this year.

Here’s the results:

When I last did this Swinging Heaven had 15 times as many members online as we did, the gap has now narrowed to less than 7. I’ve repeated this quite a few times and the ratio is fairly constant, which I guess is some backup for the other statistics.

I’ve now decided to remove both Swing2us and UK Swingers from my benchmarking as both sites have simply dropped out of the running. In some ways I’m a little sad as I’ve known both sites for a very long time. I guess in some ways it’s a warning to us all that you can be one of the top sites and then in a couple of short years end up not even in the top 10. Anyway, I’ve decided to replace these sites with Swingfans.com and Dogging.co.uk.

Taking Swingfans first, this is a genuine community site which isn’t ran for cash. I think that it was where a lot of refugees from Swinging Heaven ended up when they introduced all the charges. Anyway, although we have more registered members than they do it looks like they have more visitors per day (by about 30%). Their Alexa rank today is 41,774.

Dogging.co.uk is a site that I’ve not noticed before but I like the way it’s been structured for SEO. Interestingly, I saw a forum post on their homepage which said “[dogging.co.uk will] probably turn out like a load of other websites (not just sex orientated ones) i’ve been on their great for while everyone gets on no bother, but then as word spreads and it gets higher up in the search engines a lot o pillocks come into it”. It is a problem which I hope we will avoid. It’s Alexa rank is 102,414.