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Greetings and thank you for your interest in the Creative COW site.
Today, as I write this on October 30, 2007, the COW itself is over six-and-a-half years old. But the story goes back much further than the COW and the success of the COW is far from the "overnight success" many assume.
We actually started building media professionals sites back in 1995, and have now been at this for over 12 years. 12 years! Who'd have thought that our original effort would grow into this? The original 1995 site (the Media 100 Worldwide Users Group) grew out of the local Media 100 users group we helped start in 1994 in the San Francisco Bay area. That local user group was then hosted by Steve Whitney and Peter Rafanan of EISI. (Steve would later go on to work for Media 100 before leaving to become VP of Sales & Marketing for Puffin Design, makers of Commotion.)
In the beginning, we worked without search engines and we knew the names and many of the personal stories of nearly everyone who came to our site. Today, there's no way we could do that! Now, we often get more registered members in a single day than those who made up our original site's membership back in 1995.
Today, Google Analytics reports show that Creative COW has exceeded over 500,000 monthly "Absolute Unique Visitors" logging in, with months that have gone as high as 11 million pageviews for the month! (Click here for our complete traffic report.) We now have over 35,000 print-edition subscribers of Creative COW Magazine and over 50,000 people around the world get the popular PDF edition. Our newsletters have grown to reach out to nearly 300,000 users from around the world. We have a series of CD-ROM and DVD-ROM training products -- the Creative COW Master Series -- and some of our podcasts are the top-ranked podcasts in their field over at the Apple iTunes Store.
Some people like to say that we started this to make money. The truth is, of the 12 years we have been doing this, only the first 18 months and the last 30 have seen us in the black -- and even then, it seems as if we are always adding more free services for our members, whenever money allows. The other 8 years saw us pouring heart and soul as well as every dime we had into keeping this community alive. We even had some friends step up to the plate and pay the internet bill on three occasions when we couldn't afford to. Thank you. We have had to work very hard to make this into a business because there is simply no way that you can give away all that we do without someone paying the freight. Thankfully, we can now afford to give away all the free magazines, tutorials, podcasts, newsletters, support forums and many other services the COW provides absolutely free of charge.
It's been an incredible ride to get here and we are indebted to our leaders, our contributing editors and our sponsors. Many have become dear friends and we'd like to thank you all.
We get asked many questions about the COW and we've tried to answer many of them with the following links. So, if you'd like to learn a bit more about the COW, its history and those who make up our team, here are some of the answers to the most commonly asked questions...
I hope this tells you a bit about us and what we are all about. If you have any questions about Creative Cow, please feel free to write. We do respond to your questions.
With kind regards,
Kathlyn Lindeboom
kathlyn@creativecow.net
Director, Creative Cow
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