I found this interesting; it even includes demographic information. Furthermore it provides some good explanations to our questions. Take a look!

http://www.quantcast.com/...om#traffic

So, how does the site know how much money we make, race, education, If we have kids....






lotusflow3r.com
view site 5.8K
wd%3Acom.lotusflow3r Summary Traffic GeographicDemographics BusinessLifestyle Loading...Traffic Summary

This site reaches approximately 5,796 U.S. monthly people. The site is popular among a African American, 35-49, mostly male audience.
expand
Audience Also Visits
People who visit this site are likely to visit these sites as well:
Audience Also Visits Affinity
prince.org 222.0x
sonypictures.com 3.4x
joshmadecash.com 1.9x
cduniverse.com 1.3x

-----

amorbella said:

I think when you sign up for internet service,some information is obtained, but this could be very faulty. For an example, if the service is under my husband's name it would capture his demographic information from our IP address, not mine.

And by comparison, traffic to prince.org is 68.8k visits per month.

amorbella said:

Credit history?

serpan99 said:

serpan99 said:

Oh my goodness! LOL!

Wow, so 25,000 people were online about the time the site launched, so if all those people paid $77 that's nearly $2Million!

mypancakeplaces said:

I didn't. And I'm not alone.

I don't think you can use that max figure of 25,000 visits in March to determine membership levels. I think you need to look at the average number of visits per month, because after the initial launch, the only people visiting that site would be members.

Average visits per month = 3,812. If you assume the average member checks in once a week to see if there's anything new, that's 953 US members. Let's assume US makes up 66% of total membership, so that would mean there are 476 non-US members, putting the total membership at 1,329.

1,329 * $77 = $102,333 in TOTAL Lotusflow3r.com revenue.

This is a conservative estimate. But let's say that only half the people that are members visited at all over the last couple months, and all the numbers are understated by a factor of 2.

That still generates only $204,666 in TOTAL revenue for Prince.

And if you want to get even more liberal, assume that there are only 2 visits per month per member on average, so double the numbers again.

Still only $409,332. Even under the best scenario, it looks like Prince took a bath on this deal.

I sure hope that isn't the reason he's apparently abandoned the site.

.
[Edited 6/20/09 6:47am]

RodeoSchro said:

Good thoughts here and you are right on point! I think it says approximately 5800 people visited 3812 times in the month of May, which would make me believe he has nearly 5800 in membership, but that still is not enough to justify site development and support staff's annual salary, So....Lotusflow3r.com is probably being left to die and P is packaging up the shirts all by himself!

RodeoSchro said:

A bath.....really? Depends on how u look at it. They created a website for $85.00 plus cost, and generated from $100k to 400k. They have provided next 2 NOTHING in content. From where I'm sitting, they made a very decent return on their investment. I wonder how the OPIUS Project made out?

squirrelgrease said:

it's a crazy theory,but it just might make sense.

serpan99 said:

[Edited 6/20/09 8:12am]

these are only US numbers, aren't they? likely a lot more people from
other countries joined the site since the cd was not available over at
their stores until much later (in the beginning it looked like it was
never going to be released to other countries).

so let's be very generous and say he's got something like 30,000 people
who have signed up.

that's still a shitty little number to release some serious content to
the site.

we can pretty much forget about the outtake material, especially those
songs from his prime 80s period.

he's never released them before so why would he squander them on a site
with a tiny amount of members (compared to global retail sales which in
recent years keep dwindling for prince but which still amount to at least
100,000 *think TRC etc*).

i'm starting to hate that site with a passion, eventho i've visited it a
grand total of 3 times over the past months.

IstenSzek said:

Good Point! .....even with those additional memberships, prince.org still has much more traffic than Lotusflow3r. How sad.

I'm gonna make a point of NEVER visiting there now-especially if the next update (if that ever happens) is as shit as the last. No doubt whatever it'll be the info will be here-and if i've seen/heard it, no point visiting

Mabey our lack of intarest will give them the message-cuz mailing them is pointless

We have a traffic jam..5000 fan pile up. Will last a year. Expect heavy rain.

shellyann said:

The easiest way to grow membership is to add content.

This board has become filled with threads about the fact nothing new is on LF. The main content on the site is the 3 albums everyone bought from target for $12.

Beyond that there are a bunch of music videos we've all seen plus a couple of new ones from the new album, a handful of single song concert performances, and two longer videos that have circulated before (one of which was released on laser disc), none of which are provided in formats people can easily use on their video iPods or play on their big screen tvs. Instead they are on formats where you can't even sequence the videos (without utilizing some sort of workaround).

The site could have been so much better, especially given the high sign up costs. Instead of single song concert performances, post the whole concert. Instead of having to navigate the odd globe to go from track to track, and having your playback quality depend on the reliability of your internet connection, let subscribers download the videos in at least DVD quality that they can easily burn to DVDs, play on iPods, etc.

Do the same thing with audio - CD quality unreleased music. There are supposed to be 10 CDs of unreleased material that were mastered for this project, where are they? How do they expect significant sign ups when there is no positive word of mouth and they are doing nothing to generate it. They haven't even sent out the t-shirts, which really isn't that hard to do. My own company could have printed and shipped the t-shirts within a day or so of people signing up.

Prince has been trying the online thing for years now, once they got the glitches worked out, the very best year by far was the first year. It's gotten progressively worse each year after.

squirrelgrease said:

Nopes.
Check the methodology link at the bottom of that page. They have a bunch of users feeding them info about their web activity, numbers are extrapolated from that, possibly cross matched with some other data that they may be able to get from ISPs or things like public proxies etc.

I think the market leader in this sort of usage analyses is probably Alexa.
This is their page about lotusflow3r.com
http://www.alexa.com/site...flow3r.com

WOW.....those figures at that page are awful.Man with figures like these-my money is on he's in one of his 'moods' with it all-mabey even with us for daring not to love it.....

There is only one person that can make things better-and clearly by now, with all the threads here, knowing just how many of us have bothered to contact them, THEY KNOW HOW WE FEEL.....

Weather anyone of em' is brave enough/allowed to tell Prince anything negative-the site know.

I'm getting my answer to that from their silence. Their lack of enthusiasm. The t shirt fiasco.

It feels finished before it started

WHAT A JOKE AFTER THE WONDERFUL SUMMER 2007

A whole new galaxy of disappointment.

I knew why I didn't join, I learned from the past.

Please never ever call prince a good business man again.

m3taverse said:

So they get a possibly skewed cross section. Interesting.

m3taverse said:

What! Do they look at their own stats? Alexia shows that the average time on the site in June is 1 minute per login, down from 3 minutes.Shouldn't that tell them that members check in to see if there is anything new and leave? If it wasn't content we already own,we would watch some videos or listen to some music, but they have to know their members already have most of this material.

squirrelgrease said:

Yeah, although over time, given that you have access to some exact datasets, you can normalize the results of your analyses.
But even without that, this type of data can be meaningful, as results from all sites have about the same level of incorrectness. So it's kind of hard to say that lotusflow3r has 5000 visits per month, but based on the same dataset, you can validly claim that prince.org has much more traffic than lotusflow3r.com. Comparisons are what tools like these are really about, if a site gets a million visitors, should it be considered a success if the other guy is pulling 10 times that.
So the fun doesn't really start until you directly compare lotusflow3r.com to u2.com, madonna.com, or even prince.org. On Alexa, if you set the date range to max (2 years), and compare sites that you feel have some sort of relationship, you can start drawing conclusions.