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Kingston is the CEO/CTO of Slickstream.
Slickstream's recent update includes a major upgrade to search. This was more than a year in the making and incorporates some big concepts. One of those concepts is "two-dimensional search" (or "2D"). The other is "progressive search". I'm going to explain those to you below.
Slickstream stories are getting added to a lot of our customers' websites. We've been asked an important question frequently: Why should I add stories to my website?
Slickstream has been updated for all customers today. These changes should have no effect on existing customers -- at least until they choose to take advantage of these new capabilities.
Since Slickstream went live a year ago, we've been growing quickly. Last October we managed a handful of websites, indexed a few thousand webpages daily, and processed a few hundred gigabytes of traffic per month. Now we are handling more than 600 websites, indexing more than half a million webpages in real-time, and over the past month have processed more than 30 terabytes of traffic.
If you use advertising on your site to generate revenue, then you may have heard horror stories about what will happen when Google starts to block third-party cookies on Chrome -- currently slated for sometime in 2022.
First of all, this isn't as bad as it may sound. Apple started blocking third-party cookies earlier this year, and most publishers have not seen a significant decline in RPMs on mobile. With about half of the entire mobile market, this is significant.
Slickstream had a major service outage today affecting all customers. The outage started around 12:30PM Pacific Time and lasted approximately 30 minutes. At that point, service should have returned to normal on all sites.
Slickstream is being updated starting today for some sites, rolling out to others within the next few days.
We're in the process of updating all sites with our latest release.
As usual, if you haven't already seen these changes, you should be seeing them sometime in the next few days as we roll them out to all sites.
The food blogging business has not been immune to the effects of Covid-19. We heard many of our customers tell us about how advertising rates had dropped. And we were well aware that traffic levels to these websites grew significantly during the crisis.
Because of our rather unique position, we were able to put numbers to these stories. Sure enough, traffic levels have almost doubled during the crisis, while advertising rates fell to about half of their usual levels, although rates have been recovering recently.
