Looking for the reason for the immense number of newly created forum threads (even without counting Bohan 呵呵), I came across the follow set of figures, extracted from your most recent newsletters:

Oct 10: Hours spent: 4,795 ！！
Sep 10: Hours spent: 4,070 ！
Aug 10: Hours spent: 3,565
Jul 10: Hours spent: 3,321
Jun 10: Hours spent: 3,644
May 10: Hours spent: 3,413
Apr 10: Hours spent: 3,343
Mar 10: Hours spent: 3,536
Feb 10: Hours spent: 3,319

...

You may not publish lots of business information (except maybe on georgesaines.com) to non-lenders, but apparently, marketing has made some progress recently.

一步一个脚印！

An iphone/ipod app would also help immensely with marketing. I've told countless interested people about Skritter, but who knows how many of them actually remember it enough to sign on? A few times people have got back to me having forgotten the name, having tried searching for it. Showing an app in practice would do wonders I imagine (even though I'd use it purely for demonstration, doing it on a PC is far more useful to me at the moment).

Incidentally, how come Skritter doesn't appear on any of the first pages of a google search for things like "write chinese characters" or "write chinese online"?

PS. At least half of those extra 700 hours are yours, I assume?

@穆兒 Woo-hoo! Thanks for the shout out!

okay, I just got really excited. Anyway, I don't understand what this thread is about. How are you able to see that Doug spent that many hours on Skritter?

It is the combined total hours all users have spent on Skritter per month. Doug does marketing.

@Byzanti:

Total hours = Number of users * total hours per user

As LHS increases, either the number of users or the time spent per user need to increase.
A 20% increase in the time spent per user is rather unlikely, thus it is safe to assume that the number of users has increased.

The increase could also be influenced by the last contest. My personal skritter time certainly went up thanks to it and by way more than 20% :)

My time went up too - huzzah!

I just built a ticker that counts up how many items have been studied and who just studied what. So many people studying! It's kind of addicting to look at. Will probably include it in the home page the next time we update it.

We're trying to get the "Learn Chinese Characters" keyword, where we've stalled at #5. Google search results are tough, though. If your site isn't built for SEO, with lots of link veins, it's hard to compete.

Actually that ticker is a great idea. What sets Skritter apart from my other learning methods is that here I can see so many other people on the forums studying and having a hard time with cramming the characters. It's encouraging, really. Like an army of eager language learners vs. the great hanzi/kanji army of doooom, 咱们“傲气面对万重字”！ ;)