For a while I did not write about the Spil Games sites in China, and now this is already the second post in a week. Reason is that we keep on breaking all our records. On Monday game.com.cn broke through the 1 million unique visitors per day for the first time, a big milestone for the company. For people who are not familiar with internet terms, 1 million unique visitors means that 1 million different people (or to be more precise, IP addresses) have visited our site yesterday. If somebody comes to the site twice or three times per day, he/she will only be counted once.
To put the growth in perspective, on August 4, 2006 we had 20,000 unique IP’s (the site had just launched), and on August 4, 2007 we were at 240,000 unique IP’s for game.com.cn. Next to that our other main site xiaoyouxi.com registered about 800,000 uniques on Monday, for a daily total of 1.8 million on our Chinese sites. All our statistical data comes from Google Analytics.
Over the course of the next few months, we plan to make our sites even more attractive with among others additional community features. I wonder how big our sites will be one year from now!
This afternoon I plan to treat everybody at Spil Games Asia and Zlong Games ice cream to celebrate their big achievement.
Hi, i noticed something weird on xiaoyouxi.com : it includes a small JS popup in the bottom in the style of a QQ message (you know that blue window, red close button, image and some links). It points to this url:
http://c.webgame.com.cn/webgamew.php?from=xiaoyouxi.com&url=http://www.webgame.com.cn/
I'm a bit surprised this tactic is used, because usually I only see this on websites with dubious nature (like QQ-clones and sites that try to install spyware etc).
Hi Thijs, it’s nothing weird, it’s a normal pop-up ad like you have on many Chinese sites. And not just dubious ones actually, although that was also my initial thought when we started doing this.
Outside China pop-ups are a lot more dubious than here, you don’t see them that much anymore. We did some tests, and we find we do not lose traffic because of (small) pop-ups, as long as they do not interfere too much.
And of course we make money from this 🙂 I am running a business and then you have to make trade-offs sometimes. In this case I think I made the right decision. We’ve had these for quite some time already, and feedback is mainly positive.
Thanks for your detailed reply!
I think popups are no problem in China. People are used to it and seem to like flashy designs. I was just surprised by the graphical design of the popup, which seemed similar to the QQ messages to increase the click-ratio (perhaps some people think they get a QQ message, while instead it is an advertisement).
Nothing wrong with advertising of course, everyone does that 🙂
It is useful method to attract ppl who has used to QQ or floating popup. If a site invents new form (good design), some ppl will feel weird instead of clicking 🙂