Finding the reason is why I started this thread. So far, some say that biz is steady and some say it is slow. Biz typically drops off closer to the end of the year but it may be early this year due to economic slow-down.
Finally ive got a paid submission today, not good news in UK though http://news.uk.msn.com/uk/second-phase-of-recession-likely-3
I gotta say, this is one thing that has not been affected by the down economy, at least not from what I can tell. Advertising, sure... Directory submissions? Not so much. I've not noticed any seasonal drop offs. Again, things are pretty consistent. I have noticed a larger number of sites going dead though. In other words, sites we have listed that have disappeared....
I just took a quick look at an average day and it appears we deactivate 15 sites, reactivate around 19 sites and nuke 3. Does not include what is brought on as new.
I've been editing submissions for 10 years and have never seen anybody use the terms "deactivate 15 sites, reactivate around 19 sites" I guess I'm getting old!
We wrote a script that crawls the site and checks to see if a site is active or not, sees if its reachable. Kinda like you or me typing in www.whatever.com and if the answer is a 404, or the site is just not responsive, it gets deactivated. So the listing is still there, it just does not show up in the directory. An email goes out to the contact on file (person who listed the site) and notifies them that we were unable to reach their site. (keep in mind there are a lot of qualifiers here to insure that there are no false positives due to network issues, etc..) This gives that user the ability to respond to us so that we can either remove the site if it truly is no more, or fix the URL if say they changed their domain name or something. If we don't get a response and the site becomes reachable again, we are notified and I can simply manually look at the site to verify whether its truly back up, or redirected, or a Godaddy landing page (which is the case very often). So if the site is truly dead I will completely delist it. If it comes back, I reactivate it. Often times I will find a site that went down for "maintenance" that lasted for several days/weeks... There will be a notification of a new link, or URL and I will update that and insure that the site still matches its original criteria. A lot of sites that go down and then come back will end up having a lot of Chinese language/fonts on them... Seems its very popular in Asia to cyber squat and redirect link juice. Still others end up as landing pages to domain registrars, web hosts, or my favorite - these places that like to generate content based on the domain name/site name. Often times it looks like a legit site at first glance. This is where you have to be careful to insure that you are really relisting/reactivating a dormant site that should be activated again. This process has worked very well to keep the directory cleaner and fresher.
I've noticed too that this has been a bad year for sites to disappear. Some weeks I'm deleting far more than adding. It's sorta like losing an old friend when a really good site just disappears off the web. Such a shame that there wasn't a plan to hand them off to someone else - in two cases, I think the folks were elderly and have died. I would have loved the opportunity to keep their sites going.
Yes it has been, we review and remove hundreds per week, and some weeks we remove many more then we add. Most removed are free submissions however.