The Joy of Creating Something On Your Own

I'm fast approaching the one-year anniversary of the launch of PoetsandQuants.com, the first of two websites created by my own company, C-Change Media Inc. And one of the more gratifying aspects of doing something on your own is seeing the response from people all over the world to your work. The web is a great place to measure your impact because there are a wealth of statistics that tell you in real-time exactly how you're doing.

With the one-year anniversary just a month away, we're fast approaching the five-million-visitor mark for our first site. But the most fascinating part of all this is seeing who is coming to PoetsandQuants for our coverage of graduate business school education and the MBA world.

Here are the top ten cities in the world and the percentage of our total uniques from each location:

  1) New York  7.7%
  2) Chicago  2.9%
  3) Washington, D.C.  2.0%
  4) Bangalore, India  1.9%
  5) San Francisco  1.7%
  6) Boston  1.7%
  7) Los Angeles  1.6%
  8) Mumbai, India  1.4%
  9) London, U.K.  1.3%
10) Singapore  1.2%

It's humbling for me to see that four of the top ten cities drawing traffic to my site are outside the U.S.: Bangalore and Mumbai in India, London, and Singapore.

Equally interesting to me is the demographic data which is truly impressive. It shows we're drawing a highly affluent, well-educated audience:

49% of the site's visitors earn more than $100,000 a year (that is 176% of the Internet average)
26% earn between $60,000 and $100,000 a year (that is 91% of the Internet average)
46% already have an undergraduate degree (that is 112% of the Internet average)
31% already have a graduate degree of one kind or another (that is 214% of the Internet average)
58% of the site's visitors are male (that is 118% of the Internet average)
42% are female (82% of the Internet average but much better than the average percentage of female MBAs)

Last week, I had an SEO consultant take a look at the site's underlying performance. His verdict: On a scale of 1-to-100, PoetsandQuants.com got a grade of 99, meaning that of 3.6 million measured sites, it came in among the top 24,000 websites in the world. Not bad for a site that creates high-quality editorial for a rather small subset of the world's population.