The drop in FT's advertising revenue is probably looking very similar as well .

Yeah, but look on the bright side:

We can now have another contest to see who will make the three-millionth post. :D

Edited to add: Oops, I see 24.05.2004 already thought of that, too.

It's hard to get ahead of the sharp folks who habituate this board. :D

I dunno about that. I think ad revenue is based more on visits/page views than number of archival posts, so the deletion/removal of the more than half million (WOW!!) OMNI posts dating back to the late '90s shouldn't affect that.

Of course, not having OMNI may mean that a few folks won't be back since their raison d'être is gone, and that could affect page views. One would hope, though, that the folks who took the time to look around FlyerTalk while they were here found other reasons to return.

The big drop was an artificial one. We lost -501427 when the number of Omni posts removed was that much greater than the number of new posts.

What interests me is what happened in late June. What was going on then that suddenly prompted such a spike in membership?

I remember there was a huge one day spike from one of the national publications running an article - I think about the cheap fare to Iceland.

I assume that Randy and FlyerTalk were mentioned in a mass-circulation publication like USAToday or mentioned on TV. Such references always seem to bring a spike in viewers and membership.

And pageviews are exactly what I am talking about. OMNI had a wealth of useful info which was very well indexed by google and brought visitors(=eyeballs) into the site.
Also, there is a question of the general number of pageview per visitor. If FT is getting paid on a straigh CPM basis (which is how most sites this large are getting paid), then the more pages with ads a visitor sees, the more $$$ FT gets. So cutting the number of pages that an average FTer sees per visit from, say, 20 to 14 (with the 6 missing being the OMNI pages the visitor would have seen) means a drop in advertising revenue.

The Icelandic Air snafu fare of ~ $62 roundtrip got the attention of the public at large?

Is the Pope a catholic? ;)

I don't think so. There is a reason why he wears that white yamulka all the time and why you have never seen him eat a ham sandwich.

Actually he is jewish. :D

Hey no religious discussions.

It's okay. This is an irreligious discussion.

IIRC that was around the time several congas got set up (gmail, ipod, etc).

As long as it doesn't involve politics :p