I know that I would love to see the event be 1000 miles ala the w1000. From a media standpoint, it just seems to build and build to a climax.

The Tybee 500 managed to do that this year with the battle for first and the battle for 3rd building to a climax. And the climax of Castrol winning by a couple of minutes and Oz winning by a couple of seconds was pretty outstanding.

But, going into the Outer Banks event.., and with only 5 boats seemed anticlimactic. It is still exciting, but after you build to that great finish.., and then.., oof! the wind went out of the sails.

Not to belittle the Outer Banks 500, but that was a hard act to follow.

In checking my log files of this event compared to the Worrell 1000, it seems that we are getting about half the hits that we once did, despite the fact that the site's normal traffic is close to 4 million hits per month. On a projected forecast from the days we were running reports on the Tybee 500, we would only jump to 6 million hits for May.
While that sounds pretty high, during the Worrell 1000 our numbers doubled and started to ge near tripling.
This tells me that interest for a two week tends to build and hits tend to build as people that at first watch, tell others, and the story grows, and the numbers grow.
But, with a week long event, followed by another week long event doesn't seem to get that same reaction.

I know folks are pretty upset with Mike Worrell, as am I. Every year we covered the race we made huge improvements.
Mary and I were quite instrumental in getting the race going again and really helped promote it.

The first year we had some pretty so-so coverage. The following year we added a couple of reporters and got different views of sujects.., big improvement.

We worked up to the point where we had several reporters, several photo takers, and then added video that we could upload within an hour or so.

So, we decided to go all out for the W1000 that was canceled. We acquired a better RV and added satellite internet at a cost of around $6000, plus monthly service fees. All just so we could quickly upload pix and video to the site for all to see.
However, we also planned on doing live feed of the starts, finishes and interviews by have a wireless camcorder broadcast to the RV which would then feed the data to the website so you could see these events "live."

But, another problem arose.., we needed our server to give us a lot more bandwidth and dedicated boxes to handle the traffic. More huge expenses.

And all to cover the Worrell 1000 that was canceled.

Luckily, Mike Worrell announced the cancelation just before another big expense. We had made arrangements to place gps position broadcasters on each boat that would transmit location every 1/2 hour and leave cookie crumbs (so you would know where each boat went, where they tacked, etc.)
The total would have been another $10,000.

We were able to defray some of our expenses with adbanners, but that was not even a drop in the bucket.

There is only one way we could have afforded all this -- if we got enough traffic to come to our site.., and hopefully just take a look at our OnLine Marine Store at www.onlinemarinestore.com

But, with the traffic so far, nothing is really being paid for.
The good news is that I am on my way to Put-in-Bay, Ohio anyway and really Love to follow these races.

Almost 5PM and hope the boats are getting nearer. Gotta go look.
Thanks for listening,
Rick