We now take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to direct your attention to an interesting study that was published yesterday by Pingdom. The website tracking company decided to analyze the demographics of the world’s top 100 blogs (according to Technorati), sorting them by reader age and gender. It’s findings regarding PetaPixel caught our eye.
Read more…
As 2011 comes to an end, here’s a look back at 10 of our most popular articles from the past year:
Image credit: Fireworks by Verpletterend
As 2010 comes to an end, here’s a look back at 10 of our most popular articles from the past year:
Image credit: Happy New Year !!! by Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton
We here at PetaPixel are pleased to announce the new Photographers Rights Gray Card Set, a nifty accessory that can help you remember your rights and educate others if you’re ever confronted while shooting.
Read more…
Update: Thanks so much for all the feedback! What we heard about the new design was overwhelmingly positive, so that’s terrific!
It was so positive, in fact, that our analytics tells us that the demographics have completely flip-flopped. Thus, we’re returning to our previous design for now.
Happy April 1st!
We were looking at our traffic analytics recently when we noticed the following graph:
What shocked us was that the 13-69 demographic completely dominates our readership, while infants, toddlers, and 70+ year old men are underrepresented.
What’s more, from a different graph we found that PetaPixel sees far less female readers than male readers.
“This has to change,” we thought.
For quite some time we had no ideas on how to pander to these underrepresented demographics. Finally, we received a revelation from Wikipedia regarding the color pink. The article contains the following gems:
In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because being related to red it was the more masculine and decided color, while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color, or related to the Virgin Mary.
That means men currently 70+ years old grew up when pink was a color associated with boys.
It has been suggested that females prefer pink because of a preference for reddish things like ripe fruits and healthy faces.
Amazing! One color that panders to both demographics we’d like to appeal to! (and we hear babies like the color pink too!)
If you’re a 70+ year old man, hopefully this new design strikes you with nostalgia and brings a tear to your eye. If you’re a woman of any age, hopefully this new design reminds you of bountiful harvests and gleaming complexions. If you’re not any of these things, we might change our design back when more infants, toddlers, 70+ year old men, and females of all ages read this blog more.
Infants and toddlers! This is for you!
Please let us know what you think about this new design in the comments. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Image credit: My Evening With the Ponies by dreamcicle19772006
When we launched back in 2009, I decided to host PetaPixel on the same hosting plan as my personal website at 1&1. Their plans are cheap (~$7/month) and they offered enormous amounts of storage and unlimited bandwidth, so I decided to try hosting PP with them.
Things have gone pretty well over the past 9 months or so, especially since we were essentially hosting the blog for free. However, we’ve grown to a point where traffic is occasionally causing our site to go down, since 1&1 tries to keep server usage fair among its customers. We’ve learned that though they offered “unlimited” traffic hosting, it’s meant for small, personal websites that don’t hog the server’s resources.
We went down again for a short period of time today, signaling to me that we should probably begin moving to something that will support us better as we continue to grow. This weekend I’m planning on moving the site over to Rackspace Cloud, and the transition has already begun. If everything goes according to plan, by the time we resume posting next Monday we’ll be serving PetaPixel from our new home.
We’ll update this post when we’re at the new location and settled down. Have a great weekend, and see you on the flip side!
Update: If you can see this update then you’re visiting us at our new home. Welcome!
