FAQ: Questions about AfterDawn.com -- site, company and servers.

Ok, I thought I might launch a separate thread that tries to address some of the most frequently asked questions about our site's technical structure and about our site's ownership base, etc. You're welcomed to ask questions and I'll update this first post accordingly when more info gets added. Also, for the technical part, I'm not an expert to say how our boxes work, but I'll liaise with Ketola to get you insight for that one as well.

1. Who owns AfterDawn.com?

AfterDawn.com is owned by AfterDawn Oy. The "Oy" means same as "LLC" means in States and "Ltd" means in the UK -- a limited company, a company that has more than X shareholders, but is not listed in stock markets.

All of the shareholders of the company are also the original founders of the site itself. I am the CEO of the company.

2. What forum software you use? phpBB? vBulletin?

Our forum software is "homemade" by me. It doesn't have a single line of code from any other forum software as I wanted to create a forum that is tightly integrated into our site's technical structure and that can be twisted and bend as much as possible when needed. And also because I like programming

3. Do you guys use PHP?

No, we don't use PHP. Or ASP. Or Java. We use application server called ColdFusion MX. Why? Because I have worked as a CF developer since 1998 and I develop faster and better with it than with any other web scripting language.

4. Who has made your site's layout?

One of our owners/staff members, a guy called Teemu Pärssinen, is our gfx guy. All the graphics on our sites are made by him.

5. How many users do you have?

We have currently (15th September, 2004) over 190,000 registered users in our user database (excluding "inactive" users).

6. How do you make money? Or do you make money at all?-)

Yes, we do make some money However, we don't have any full-time employees, all of us are still in "real life jobs", so its seriously not a very good "get-rich-quickly" scheme to setup a website We make money from advertisements -- banners, popunders, etc.

7. How many servers you have running the site?

Currently (15th September, 2004) we have five dedicated servers running the website.

...continues later...
_X_X_X_X_X_[small]Petteri Pyyny
Webmaster
http://AfterDawn.com/


Please read our guides before posting questions! Guides are available here:
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/[/small]

 

Read the first post.
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/102943

 

agent-k: Yes, all of our income comes from variety of advertisements. So, we've tried throughout our existance to balance on the fine line to make the site as clean and nice as possible and to try to have enough ads on pages to make decent income from ads.

By balancing ads/user experience, I mean decisions like not to allow popUPs ever (but we do use popunders) on our site, not to have banners on our homepage (or forums homepage), not to have bottom banners, to have only limited number of skyscrapers, etc. And even the most hated form of ads that appears on our site -- popunders -- are limited to one per user session, so you shouldn't ever see more than one popunder (those things that open behind your current browser session rather than on top of it) when browsing our site.

Years 2001-2002 were very, very bad for our site in terms of income, as the Big Advertisement Slump began around Jan/2001 and lasted for two years -- during this time we had to ask users for donations, had to use our personal credit cards, etc to pay for the servers and keep the site running Nowadays we're finally financially on solid ground -- even today its not a great business, all admins still do go to "real life jobs", but its still much, much better than what it was two years ago or so.

 

Actually, over the last year or so, we've managed to push up the banner advertisement sales (you might have noticed couple of large campaigns over the last couple of months, like Nero) and thus make the percentage of income that we get from popunders to fall in the level where even the full disappearing of popunders in form of advertisements wouldn't "kill the site" -- it would cause some serious thinking in terms of our sidekick projects (dawnload.net, mp3lizard.com, blasteroids.com) whether to continue them at all, but in terms of AfterDawn.com itself, it wouldn't cause sleepless nights, just some re-thinking of advertisements (would probably have to introduce more skyscrapers, text-embedded ads, etc).

One thing obviously is interesting to think about -- if SP2 and other forms of popup/under killers eventually kill the form of pop ads, what will replace it? My guess is that interstitials will do that -- sorta commercial breaks between page loads. And in my mind, those can be even more annoying that pops -- but that is what people have voted for when they decide to get rid of ads. As I've stated many times -- if everybody would block every single ad when visiting our site, the site would be closed or turned into a pay-per-view site.

The Porsche Carrera GT sounds nice, but is more of a daydreaming than reality -- driving a Volvo V40 now that is still mostly owned by bank ;-) But for the Carrera dream to become reality, site would have to grow from current ~15M page impressions a month to 150M page impressions a month with virtually no new expenses (apart from new servers to the cluster), so I think its still a bit too early for that ;-)

 

LOL Hope I answered your question

 

Our site is provided completely free of charge for our users, we (try to) make money out of advertising banners shown on our site instead to fund our operations, pay the servers, etc.