Ops. I meant to post about it like two weeks ago, but anyway. It’s better be late than never…

Happy New Year, OzBargain!

I have actually been back to work for a week, although I have been a bit lazy getting back to work on OzBargain (as you can see my lack of participation on the site). Hopefully this blog post will kick start 2009 and get everything in gear for me to get back working on OzBargain again.

First of all, let’s look at some of the stats from last year —

While there were up and downs last year, it was still pretty much a year of growth, continued from what we had the year before. For December 2008, we had 665,000+ visits from 221,000+ unique visitors, just falling short of 2 million page views, having 3,500+ readers on our RSS feeds and 150+ Twitter followers.

Back in March/April we had to move the site from Melbourne Australia to Fremont US as our host back then had some stability issue. For the past 9 months OzBargain has been hosted on a VPS at Linode for USD$29.95. Big kudos to Linode for the top notch service that they have provided.

Some of the most-viewed deals from last year:

• Dell Vostro 220ST Desktop + 19″ Monitor for $238.64 — it was the Dell fiasco back in November. Top deal? Maybe not, but definitely news worthy, as this page received almost 25,000 page views. It’s related deal has also received ~13,000 page views. From the latest comment on that deal, it seems that not everything has been resolved, as some people still have not received refund. Can anyone give an update on this issue?

• 10c off per litre fuel at Woolworths Fuel — lots of visitors came to this page via search engine, totalling 21,000+ hits. Don’t ask me why as I have never done any search engine optimisation :) However I guess people must have been desperate last year when the petrol price went up all the way to around $1.60/litre here in Sydney.

• Catch of the Day Birthday Bash & $199 Wii — the most commented post from last year, and has also received most negative votes. It was quite an event, but from QQQ has said to me that it’s not likely to repeat again…

• Pizzas from $4.95 pickup @ Dominos Pizzas — Pizza deals always grab lots of visitors (12,000+ hits in this case). The two $4.95 pizza deal also receive over 10k page views last year. I guess the pizza deals on OzBargain were popular enough that we have store managers posting in forums condemning the use of coupon and pizza customisation tricks. Too bad that those $4.95 coupons are getting more and more rare (if any is still valid). Maybe “eating healthy” might become a reality this year :)

• 37″ Sony Bravia LCD for $899 — 11,000 page views on this one and I wonder how many Sony Kmart has actually sold. No I did not get one although was very tempted.

To share your top bargains in 2008, please comment in this forum thread started by bargrin.

2009?

There will be various announcements throughout the year in terms of partnership and new development. A lot of details are still too early to make public, but definitely stay tuned!