1,300+ Unique Visitors to Arrt.es in first 5 days of being public

[Ghost]

I created Arrt.es to provide a simple website that allows people to view art easily, and fast. A major issue with art is that people are required to browse websites that force you to go through 1-2 (or even 3-4) pages each time you want to view a new piece of art. It can be very difficult to view art quickly. Additionally, museums are nice, but often cost money and definitely time. To actually view each piece of art in a museum, you have to commit yourself to hours of browsing. This is mainly due to art being spread out (and requiring a lot of walking), but also because each piece of art deserves your undivided attention.

a free online museum of 12,000+ artistic images​

With this in mind, I created Arrt to have as little distractions as possible (so no thumbnails on the side, ads, etc) so people can view art effectively. By clicking the logo, anyone can view a new piece of art. And if a user falls in love with a piece, they can click the share link below the art to have the share URL put in their browser. Its simplicity is why it is so popular.


1,340 Unique Visitors (Since May 31 2016)
I developed the site and had it online on May 30 2016, but I didn't share it until May 31 2016. In the last 5 days, I have gotten a total of 1,340 unique visitors. That means that 1,340 different people have used Arrt. These users have viewed a total of 6,605 art image/info pages on my website in the last 5 days. Also, the number changed 1,370 unique visitors since I posted this thread 5 minutes ago, but I'm not going to update this thread that frequently. Next milestone will be 5k unique visitors.


What did those 1,340 people do?

The average user visits 5 different art pieces before leaving the website. This statistic is a little skewed because many visitors come to see one specific image, shared on other websites, and are not coming to the site to view tons of different art. I've found though that around 5-10% of visitors who come to see a specific art piece end up browsing the site, while links in posts explaining the site (similar to this thread here) lead to a higher percentage of users viewing many pages on the site.

While most users view between 5 and 10 pieces of art, there are currently 5 users who have viewed between 100 and 400 different pieces of art (excluding myself who has viewed 1,140 pieces). This statistic especially excites me because my site is capable of pulling 1 out of 12,000+ art images/info on each page load. The fact that I'm the admin and I've only seen 10% of the art on my site (and I add hundreds to thousands of art images each day) means that I will never be able to say that I've viewed 100% of the art on my site... meaning the average user will see new art on every single page load.


How It Works

Arrt.es is powered by reddit. I created a script that visits a reddit search results page, filters the content to only show posts that include direct links to images, and then extracts the data. Currently my site pulls the reddit: karma, image URL, post title, author name/link, and some other information that I have not yet included in the public pages.

I created a script that allows me to pull content from any subreddit in less than 20 seconds. Using this page in the picture below, I can start a site just like Arrt.es, or a separate category within Arrt.es, and fill it with 10,000-20,000 images/content in less than 10 minutes. Needless to say, it's easy. If you are interested in this script, you can PM me for more information. Eventually my script for running a site off of reddit content will be open source and free (this could change).

I use my script to run two sites. Although I cannot share the other link on FP, it is currently at 1,600+ unique visitors (Since May 22 2016), with 25,000 individual page loads.

 

[Teapot]

This is such a cool website, Ghost! I just checked it out and it is extremely neat and I got to see art I never have before. Good work!

 

[Ghost]

This is such a cool website, Ghost! I just checked it out and it is extremely neat and I got to see art I never have before. Good work!

Thanks Teapot! Nice to see you around, I haven't been on FP much in a while.
I appreciate your kind words, and I'm glad you like it!


You might be interested in hearing about the future of my script, as it may end up as open source which would allow you (or anyone) to use my script to create similar random galleries of any type of content.

This spoiler contains info about v1, v2, and v3 of my script which I will most likely call 'redditPull'.

Spoiler

Arrt.es is currently v2 of my script, with v1 being on the site I briefly mentioned in my original post. v1 is basically a robust version that requires a lot of manual work and editing various files to update content/see reported content, while v2 automates most of the core functions and allows for a very easy way to deal with reports/other admin tools.

v3 will basically be a website that has multiple categories, with a separate version of the image/content randomizer for each category. That's for the future though. I will be working on v2 and perfecting it (think of Arrt.es website as a typical 'category' page in v3, with the main page listing tons of categories). The end game is having a one-stop site for tons of categories such as Painting, Photography, Sketching, and other art niches, all within an Art section - but the main site would not just have Art, it will have other categories as well such as Funny, Animals, and basically other popular /r/subreddits.

That said, I may never create v3 and just release v2 as open source once it is perfected, and then encourage people to make niche specific websites using this type of concept. It just kind of depends. If I make v3, it wouldn't be beneficial for me to allow clones (of a site that has ALL categories...whereas v2 could power different niches, which means less competition for art specifically). It just depends if I want to start a new project or not. The current project is converting some PHP functions to MySQL for faster load times & efficiency.

More specifics:
v1 gets the job done, but is limited and also functions by randomly selecting an image in a directory OR (if hotlinking instead of hosting the content) by randomly selecting an image URL to display. v1 will never be available as open source/bought due to it being very inefficient and requiring a lot of explanation to run it.

v2 automates many admin functions allowing for easy content updating, report management, and some customization. v2 will most likely become open source, but there's a chance that this will exclusively be offered to subreddit moderators on reddit only (allowing them to host a sweet image/content randomizer for the subreddits they own/manage).

v3 will allow for easy CSS changes within the admin panel, custom for each category, and the ability to update all category sections at once, while automating 100% of the functions so any admin running v3 will not have to ever edit a file manually. v3 will also have a cache of all images so a slightly smaller image can be displayed (hosted on admin's site) so it doesn't put as much stress on third party image hosters (I've seen 3 blogs get shut down for bandwidth reasons since I opened my site. They unfortunately were hosting large images that were hotlinked on my site). The full image will still be able to be seen, using the original image URL. This feature seriously helps in the case of an image host being shut down, or temporarily down for maintenance - as it stands, if imgur.com or another popular host goes down for an hour, my site is useless for that hour. That's unacceptable.

v3 will incorporate MySQL instead of solely relying on PHP functions like v1 and v2. v3 will use both PHP, HTML, JS (to offload some server side processes on to the user), and mySQL. Using a DB will seriously improve the site's efficiency as it's easier to select data from a DB than to use fopen(), read/write functions, and file_exists() - which are some PHP functions that are unfortunately used a lot in order to save reddit data quick & in bulk.

v3 will never become open source, but may be available for purchase for $5-10 per copy in the future.

 

[Deleted member 25872]

Congratulations on hitting 1,300+ unique visitors! 🙂

 

[MasterA]

Congratulations on the achievement.

 

[Cierra]

Congratulations!

 

[roselillya]

wow that is really cool, and congrats on all the views 🙂

 

[LostOne1]

Hey congrats there! Keep it up!