Once a week, I like to thank ITG's sponsors here in the blog; and now that we actually have sponsors, that makes the thank-you a lot easier! Anyway, my many thanks to the businesses below, for patronizing this publication:

--Second Life Insider
--Big Red Button: A store for fans of Joss Whedon's Firefly
--xXx Fantasy Escorts
--Trivia With Samantha (held each Sunday, 4 to 5pm SLT)

Although no one's technically gotten theirs done yet, most of these businesses also qualify for a free month of website advertising as well (a 313 x 125 "mini-banner"), by having purchased a quarter-page ad or larger in our first PDF magazine. As soon as they're ready, you'll be seeing them appear on each page here, interweaved within the sidebar items there on your left.

And speaking of which, I thought I'd occasionally also share the latest demographic information about our readers here, as verified by the third-party service Google Analytics, for all you potential advertisers who are wondering what kind of return-on-investment you can expect here. As the above chart shows, for example, yesterday ITG had 1,200 unique visitors come by in a 24-hour period; if you assume that another 10 percent of our readers are keeping up via RSS, that's officially 1,320 unique people reading ITG a day, as of this date. That chart is also telling me that roughly 3,000 unique people have visited the site since it opened two weeks ago, and that they've read a total of 4,500 pages while here. So in other words, roughly half of ITG's visitors are coming by to read that day's entry and then leave, while the other half are checking out one other thing here each day as well.

This second chart reinforces the findings of the first; it's saying that about 40 percent of ITG's visitors on any given day are repeat visitors, with 60 percent first-time visitors. Now, that number's a little off from the norm on this particular week -- we did get mentioned by the insanely popular BoingBoing.net, which brought just a ton of new (mostly non-SL) visitors, many of whom I doubt are going to stick around for very long. Before the BoingBoing mention, this chart was holding pretty steady at a 50/50 split, between new readers and returning ones; that's a number I'm very happy with, a much higher visitor-retention rate than many other blogs achieve.

And then this is an overview of where those 1,320 readers a day are coming from; like SL itself, you can see that the majority of them are in the US and Europe. These are certainly not the only domains, however, where one can find ITG readers; so on top of the 200 people in the Chicago area (where I live in RL) who are reading this, I'd also like to say hi to the 40 in Silicon Valley, the 30 in New York, the 20 Microsoft employees, the 75 in London and the 30 in Manchester, the 5 in Oslo, the 6 in New Zealand, the 4 in Paris, and that one lonely resident out there in Malaysia who's checking in regularly. I'm glad to have you all here!