GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum

Was noodling around and came across an old article I wrote. Sharing with those haven't seen it.

http://www.buildinganempire.com/hits.html

Oh, and
"This is an unbelievable read from one of the most successful free
site operators to ever enter the biz". - RB (Max Cash)

Almost everyone is interested in THIS subject. And most of you that took the time to be here are probably in the following predicament. You've been working on your sites for some time, and the money is just not rolling in the way you expected it to. Furthermore, you just can't really figure out how to get your website traffic up and really rolling and you're wondering if you'll ever get it. "What am i doing wrong?"

Now something to keep in mind is this, increasing your hits is HARD work. Very hard. But, it gets easier as you go along - because the principles of exponential growth come in to play. Let me remind you of the concept of exponential growth before we really get going here. Because it's very important. Now I know from experience, that as soon as I mention the word math, most people start hearing "blah blah blah blah increase your hits blah blah blah blah .. do this, and so on" and I ask that if your math skills are weak, that read you this over and over about until it makes sense. It will. I promise. And with it will come a greater understanding of where you are in HitsLand.

In every day language, people throw the word exponential around and use it whenever something increases fast. I hear it on the news all the time. They're using the word incorrectly. I don't mean what they mean. I mean something very specific. The mathematical definition. The Real Deal. Let's go. But let's first talk about compound interest, because most people are more familar with this .. and then we'll tie them together later.

Compound Interest is a powerful, powerful concept. Jerry Seinfeld once said, "I know people that base their entire life on compound interest."

If you ask your bank teller about compound interest she will say something like, "well, if you have a certain amount of money to start with and then add your interest you'll have a certain amount of money, and then if you add your interest again, you'll have more money and so on." So you ask the teller for your bank balance and what your interest is, and after she says 4% per year and $836 and laughs, you decide to go home and figure out what this might be worth some day. (Our teller is a really hot chick, because this website is about Porn Sites!)

So you get out a calculator and a pen and make a chart. "OK, I have $836 and after a year, I gain, let's see, .04 times $836, that's $33.44 so that's my interest. So after a year, I have, hmmmm .. $836 plus $33.44, that's $869.44. OK now, in the second year, I start with $869.44 and gain .04 times $869.44 and so on. Here is the chart by the way. I rounded the numbers off to the nearest cent.

Year Money at Start of Period Interest New Total
1 $836 33.44 $869.44
2 $869.44 34.77 $904.21
3 $904.21 36.16 $940.38
4 $940.38 37.61 $978.00
5 $978.00 39.12 $1017.12
6 $1017.12 40.68 $1057.80
7 $1057.80 42.31 $1100.11
8 $1100.11 44.00 $1144.11
9 $1144.12 45.76 $1189.88
10 1189.88 47.59 $1237.48

So anyhow, your $836 becomes $1189 after 10 years! Disappointing right? Hell, yeah it is. Now hold on a second and follow me, I'm going somewhere with this. OK, now everytime we want to calculate this for 10 years, we don't want to have to do all that calculating and writing, so this time we'll ask a mathematician how to calculate it. And he says this, "Well, you take your initial interest rate, add one to it, raise it to the power of however much time goes by and multiply it by your initial money." You might have just heard "blah, blah, blah, blah." So I'll do it for you, in our initial example, we have .04 and $836. So we add one to .04 and get 1.04. We raise it to the tenth power (for ten years) and get 1.48. Then we multiply that 1.48 by our initial $836 and get $1237.48.

OK, well I can write that as a formula now. Money = P(1+r)t

P (the principal)is your starting money, r the rate, and t the time. First you do what's in the parentheses, 1+r, then you raise to the t power. and then multiple by P.

Well, what if I gained 10% per year instead of 4%. Following the formula:

Money = P(1+r)t
Money = $836 (1+.10)10 = $2168.
If you don't see a raised t, upgrade your browser.

Hell, that's a little better. If I could make 20% interest , after 10 years I'd have $5176.29. And here comes the magic, if I waited 20 years, I'd have $32,050. And 30 years? Almost $200,000. And then it REALLY starts piling in! So think about that. If you or someone you knew took $836 in 1971 and made 20% per year on it until now, it would be worth $200,000 now. Now making 20% interest is quite difficult. And what the hell does this have to do with getting more hits anyway?

When something's growth at some time step depends on the state it was in, in the previous time step, the growth is termed exponential. The equation for something that is exponential and varies with time is y = xt .. which you'll notice is just the formula we used for compound interest earlier. Comparing:

Money = P(1+r)t
y = xt

Where Money is y, and P(1+r) is x.

Note that the term exponential comes from the fact that their is an exponent t.

The Earth's population grows this way. In 1950 there were about 3 billion people on earth, and now there are 6 billion. It is estimated that there were less than 2 billion people before 1900. About 1 billion in 1800, and going way back, no more than 350 million in 1000 and probably less than that. Going WAY back to about 10,000 BC, it is estimated that there were only between 1 and 10 million people. Now most everyone agrees that the Earth is BILLIONS of years old, and here is THE FUNDAMENTAL POINT : The human population on earth has spent almost ALL of it's time at very small numbers and because of exponential growth and "the magic of compound interest" has only recently reached billions and now threatens to run away like mad. Because small little additions percentage-wise mean a LOT when you start with billions.

Now finally, bringing this all together, imagine a hypothetical adult website that you run. And that you can increase the hits for your website by 1% per day. And that you start with 100 hits. If you graphed your daily hits for a very long period, you would see something that looks just like the earth's population, you spend a long time in the small digits, and it takes a LONG time to get to anything that sounds worth your trouble, but eventually, you hit a certain threshold, and that 1% starts to feel enormous once it passes some sort of psychological criteria you have for registering on your dollar radar.

Your formula for this would be hits = 100*(1.01)t where t is days. Now I want to know how much time it will take to reach certain dollar amounts, so I do a little algebra on the equation and get

t= log(hits/100)/log(1.01)

Now we're getting uglier, right? You don't have to know what a log is to get this. Just grab a calculator that has a log function on it and do this. To see how long it would take to get 200 hits, push 200 then divide by 100, then push log, then hit divide, then hit 1.01 and then log again and you should have 69. It will take 69 days to get to 200 hits. So let's see how long it takes to get to 1000, then 10,000, and then 100,000 hits.

After 231 days, you reach 1000 hits.
After 462 days, you reach 10,000 hits.
And after 694 days, you would reach 100,000 hits.
So, for our hypothetical website, that follows these rules we made up, it takes 694 days to go from 100 hits to 100,000. And you spend a full 67% of that time below 10,000 hits getting very frustrated feeling that nothing is working right but it is!

Math is a VERY POWERFUL tool for understanding web site dynamics and formulating a plan. If you're at this stage of the game, in the lower bound of the exponential curve, wondering what to do, I hope you have gained some new insight and that you realize that you ARE on the right path or that you can start this strategy of very small daily gains that eventually becomes something enormous, huge, weighty, beautiful, and makes some dollars too.

One thing to keep in mind is that this IS a model. A simplification. Attaining exactly 1% gains every day is impossible. There are many fluctuations and other subtle nuances to take into account in this mode. In fact, when you only have 100 hits, you will most likely grow much FASTER than 1% per day and then it will slow down, on some days your server will be slower or faster, one of your trade partners might go down, someone might get listed ahead of you on a link list. An interesting point, the model is more robust when you have a system of sites rather than just one.

Back to the population analogy, the example is this. Assume at one point there were 2 humans, one male, one female, and that they had a child. Population growth rate that year was 50%! And then of course, it goes down from there. Sometimes it stayed very steady for long periods of time, and then in the 1300's, due to war and the plague, it actually decreased. In the first half of the twentieth century, population growth rate was about 1% per year averaged worldwide then from 1950-1980 INCREASED to something like 1.8% due to improved medicine amd other technogical improvements.

In the adult web, we have our own wars, plagues, and medicinal advances. And they have often dramatic effects on our perception of "how we're doing."