Re: UKNM: How much is enough

[Sean Phelan]

At 4:14 pm +0000 12/2/99, Jim Sterne wrote:

>

>Every time they doubled their capacity (both servers and

>pipes) they doubled their pageviews. They both said that

>people have a time limit when surfing. People will spend

>only X minutes at your site and if you can show them 6

>pages in that X minutes, that's all they'll look at.

>However, if you can serve up 12 pages in X minutes,

>they will look at 12 pages.


Absolutely.  That is exactly what has happened here at Multi Media

Mapping; a bandwidth hike immediately causes a traffic hike. Same

thing happened (and this really surprised me) when we rearranged

some servers and moved our main relational database off the primary

web server and on to a dedicated machine.


Although the maps didn't go out any quicker, all the local info was

being retrieved and displayed way faster, with the result that users

browsed it far more.


Which begs the question, especially in this group, of how advertisers

will feel about such things.  If Joe User comes to our site and

retrieves twice as many pages now we have tuned up our servers, we

will send twice as many banners, and the many advertisers paying our

(very moderate) CPM will spend twice as much with us. However, Joe

user is probably less likely to click on a banner now he is getting

pages even more quickly.  He is certainly not twice as likely to

click.


Hm; maybe we should lower the bandwidth on our advertising-supported

pages and increase it for our fee-based users :-)   Except that would

lead to a massive stream of complaints :-(


Cheers

Sean


=============================================================

Sean Phelan

seanmultimap [dot] com

     http://www.multimap.com

phone (within UK): 0171 433 0460      fax (UK): 0171 209 5194

phone (Int'l):  +44 171 433 0460      fax:   +44 171 209 5194


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