I had nothing else to do today after writing an article for one of my sites, so I popped open Photoshop (well, that's a lie... it's always open in the background somewhere) and pasted Analytics reports spanning 3 years for 2 of my new and 2 old websites. Traffic on these sites is not much, as you can tell, but it has been a long road toward understanding what works on the Internet in terms of increasing traffic and building value. I love long term statistics because they tell a story... If you are wondering what those traffic down-falls are for three of my sites simultaneously... that was when my hosting company decided to change database servers. I was busy with a full time job at the time, and so I couldn't be on guard for that event. Eventually I restored everything, but the traffic never returned to the two new sites in the same way. However, one of the old sites (the first one on the list) has survived the same traffic disaster (same server), and continued to grow traffic. This shows that older sites are more resilient to service downtime. This also shows importance of guaranteed uptime.
Thanks for this thread. It explains a lot. I've had a new site go down for a few days and it got de-listed. Blah. I'll make sure to buy aged domains next time.