Colnect's Founder Speaks With Leadel.NET

This interview has been done a couple of months ago and published yesterday. At the time, Colnect had ~4,200 collectors and today we are nearly 7,000 strong. There are a lot of references to Colnect's winning the Startup2.0 competition but it also goes over what Colnect is and is trying to achieve.

You're welcomed to comment here or on YouTube. Enjoy :)

Colnect Finalizes the Acquisition of E-Bay (as confirmed on LinkedIn)

Colnect expanded its market reach today by acquiring the on-line startup E-Bay, in a move designed to solidify its place atop the collectibles market. The transaction was confirmed on LinkedIn, with Amir Wald taking over immediately as E-Bay's Chairman of the Board and CEO. Although the acquisition is expected to increase traffic to Colnect slightly, the real long-term benefits lie in the potential of using the Colnect brand name to rejuvenate E-Bay's (and several of its subsidiaries) fledgling operations and to eventually turn them into profitable ventures with high traffic.



Now seriously: Linked-In should fix this bug ASAP.

AdSense Revenues vs. Traffic

Should more traffic bring more revenues on AdSense? Read on and you might be surprised.

Colnect is a content-rich website for collectors of stamps, coins, banknotes, Phone Cards, Bottle Caps and Tea Bags.

We use Google Analytics to measure our traffic and it's connected to the AdSense account. A comparison of Colnect's statistics for September-October 2009 reveal that in comparison to the 61 days before them, there has been a rise of 31% in AdSense Page Impressions, 36% in AdSense Unit Impressions but ONLY 3.3% in AdSense Revenues!!!

Yes, you are reading these statistics correctly. Correlation between the rise in traffic and in revenues is almost non-existent. A few reasons come to mind but let's start with your comments on the subject. What do you think?

Collectors on FaceBook

Stamps? Coins? Banknotes? Phone Cards? Bottle Caps? Tea Bags?

Collectors from all around the world, even those not familiar with Colnect and how unique it is, are welcomed to view Colnect's fan page on FaceBook:

Special November Promotion

You can get FREE premium membership for 1 month. No payment details needed. Share your Colnect profile on your FaceBook wall and ask us for FREE membership.

6,666 collectors - 46,666 monthly visitors - 2,123,456 page views

Maybe others like to present their statistics in round numbers, but not on Colnect. Just about 2 months ago, there were 5,555 collectors who became Colnect members and now we've crossed the 6,666 mark. That's exactly 20% growth, which is unfortunately a round number ;)

Traffic from non-registered members has also grown considerably since we last reported. Over 2,123,456 pages of Colnect were presented to more than 46,666 unique visitors during the last 30 days. This is a growth of approximately 7.77% and 5.43% from the previous 30 days.

Why Should You Care?

Collector? The more Colnect members there are, the more possibilities to find other collectors to trade with. More collectors are updating our catalogs constantly.

Dealer? The more Colnect members there are, the more... OK, you already know what that means.

Advertiser? More than ever, now you can easily address a highly targeted crowd of collectors. Check our advertising page.

Why is Colnect Growing?

Colnect's website, our main product, has been constantly improving. Responding to demands by collectors, the system is becoming easier and more functional to use. This encourages "word of mouth" viral spreading. Yes, it's a bit of a pat on the back but we know there's still a lot of work ahead.
Since the winning of the Startup2.0 competition, media attention has helped the growth as well.
Some non-professional SEO has helped as well. Colnect contains a lot of original content and should be favored by search engines, given that they are properly presented with it. As the content of Colnect's catalogs is constantly growing (soon we'll cross the 200,000 phonecards mark), search engines have more Colnect pages to index.

Over 2 Million Monthly Page Views

As previously reported, Colnect's traffic keeps growing nicely and we've recently passed the mark of over 2 Million page views during the last 30 days. As new collectors join Colnect and discover how it benefits them, existing members use the site extensively to manage their personal collection, which explains the rise in seen page views. This increase in site use is much bigger than the increase in page views since many actions which formerly required the whole page to be refreshed are now easily performed with Ajax requests and are thus NOT counted as page views anymore.

6,000 Registered Collectors on Colnect - Over 44,000 People Visited Colnect Last Month

During the last month, over 44,000 people have visited Colnect. Colnect's community has been growing rapidly recently and we're now over 6,000 collectors, coming from 98 different countries and using Colnect in 38 languages. Less than two month ago Colnect has passed the 5,000 collectors mark and the road to 7,000 is expected to be shorter :)

Colnect enables collectors to easily manage their personal collection and coordinate swaps ans sales. Many collectors choose to display their collections on Colnect and so you can easily see our active Stamp collectors, Coin collectors, Banknote collectors, Bottle Cap collectors and Phonecard collectors.

In addition to Colnect's unique services to collectors, it offers relevant social networking features to allow members to communicate, become friends, rate each other and more.

Opera 10 is Opera 9.8?! A user-agent Identity Crisis

Opera 10 has been released and naturally Colnect has to be tested with it. Although all of today's browsers are "complaint", they all produce different results for the same pages.

On Colnect, there are CSS pop-up menus for both the top menu and side menu. Perhaps not the best design decision, they are yet very functional to members browsing the site. So far, only Internet Explorer (IE) was not responding properly to the top menus. IE6 or lesser doesn't support them. IE7 does support them but displays them in the wrong position for right-to-left languages. IE8 does the job properly, as well as FireFox, Chrome and Opera. Actually, that was until the new Opera 10 came out and now the right-to-left languages display the popup CSS menus displaced and unusable. Only on Opera 10 the side menu pop-ups now have problems as well.

To ensure people choosing problematic browsers don't suffer, Colnect's code checks the browser by using its USER-AGENT string. When a problematic browser is encountered, the pop-up menus will simply not appear. That's how I found out that the brand new Opera 10 tells web server it's actually Opera 9.8 engine. See for yourself:



Identity crisis for Opera?