I’m very pleased to report that SurvivalBlog is now indisputably the most popular preparedness blog on the Internet, with an average 117,200 unique visits per week.
The phenomenal growth of SurvivalBlog’s circulation (which has more than tripled in the past 16 months), has brought with it some growing pains. As I’m sure you recall, since November of 2005 we used a scrolling script to make all but one of the ads slowly scroll by. This worked fine back when we had just a dozen advertisers. But unfortunately we’ve found that it was a very inefficient solution: We’ve received several complaints from readers about the scrolling ad bar sucking up their CPU cycles –by as much as 98% of available processing power! This “CPU drain” has actually cost us some readership. To avoid this problem, we had no choice to but to make a change: Starting yesterday, we switched to a random order fixed ad stack. Here is how it will work: Each time that you visit SurvivalBlog, you will see the ad stack in a new random sequence. When you come back to the site the next day, or each time that you hit “reload”, you will see the ads in a different random sequence. It is my hope that you will find this both easier on your eyes (no distracting scrolling going on), and much easier on your computer’s CPU
The other change will be coming on December 31st, when our advertising rates will be increasing by an average of 33%. In the interim since our last rate increase, both our daily hit count and our unique visit count has more than doubled. Throughout the publishing world–both in print and online– it is circulation that determines ad rates.
I hope that you enjoy the new look of the SurvivalBlog advertising stack. Please patronize our advertisers, and when you do, please mention where you saw their ad, and thank them for advertising.
Keep in mind that without advertising revenue, it would be impossible to provide SurvivalBlog as a free service, so please give your business to our paid advertisers first! Thanks!