We have added a new For Sale category to content on Sturvs. User’s dont need to add items for sale to the Business category any more. What better way would there be to launch this category than with one of our own products?

We have put together a list of our top users for the first half of 2008, which isn’t necessary based on any particular criteria, but on a general overlook on who’s presence has been most felt on the website. Also the order of our list is loosely based on quality of content.

1. notjustOk. This user is definitely “not just ok” as he has been a steady contributor of content for a few months running now. Lately it’s almost been like he’s got something to add to Sturvs every other day. He runs www.notjustOk.com, which is basically a Nigerian entertainment blog. The caption on his blog is “Someone or something that is worthy of notice” and we believe he has become this himself.
2. ocharh. Our man and Sturvs partner ocharh keeps supplying us with both old and new Nigerian music. Sturvs Music has grown as popular as it is not because of his initial booster supply of mp3s. We appreciate his efforts and also Facebook promotion.
3. seunj411. This babe has also helped Sturvs Music with her frequent upload of mp3s. We haven’t heard from her in a while though, but are sure she hasn’t forgotten about us. She has a collection of Nigerian music here, which we steal from once in a while.
4. bellanaija. We will always love bellanaija. Her blog is obviously the foremost Nigerian blog on the internet, here is some proof: http://www.google.com/search?q=naija. Watch out for her new website, being built by the same company behind Sturvs, Antigravity Inc.
5. phcityhottie. We don’t know if this user is located in PH (Port Harcourt) or just from there, but wherever she is we appreciate the article and mp3 submissions.
6. DJMightyMike. Our favorite DJ who uses Obama-style marketing to push his music on the internet. Nothing do you. He was the first user to patronize our IMEEM media embeds feature and has been using the feature regularly.
7. uzuo. We had several submissions by uzuo early after our launch and appreciate them.
8. one. This user was one of our founding members and contributed videos articles, even before we started mp3 uploads.
9. mynaijanews. MyNaijaNews.com is fast becoming the leading website for Nigerian news and we are proud to be associated with them. They were also one of the first to add our Sturvs Bookmarklet.
10. NaijaBoy4life. This user also uploads mp3 frequently, some of which have got high votes.

Think we’re unfair? Well our website logs the top users and you can view the users with the most published votes here: http://www.sturvs.com/topusers.php?sortby=5.

We appreciate every other user who visits our website even without submitting content, and would keep on working hard to give our users a better experience on Sturvs.com

The number of votes required before a submission is sent to the front page of Sturvs has been increased to 4 (from 3). This is to guarantee a good quality of content making it to the home page. With the surge in traffic and submissions, we have to gradually raise the bar. The original plan was to increase the minimum to 5 votes, but we welt it would be better to make the increase gradual. We will increase it to 5 within the next few months. Hopefully we will one day have enough traffic to increase the minimum to 10 votes.

Please note that we Sturvs admins can push any submission they feel worthy to the home page even if it has 0 (zero) votes. Submissions can also be removed from the home page if we feel they aren’t going to be of interest to visitors (as satisfying visitors is our ultimate goal) or if the same user intentionally votes up more than 1 self-related item to the home page at a time. We want to encourage other people voting on user submissions and determining whether or not they make it to the home page. Once again we will just say that satisfying visitors is our #1 goal and the #1 purpose of this website, so we will definitely always do what we can to make sure our home page contains interesting content for our visitors.

So far, the number of votes a submission gets really is a measure of how much the submission is liked by our visitors. A look at the top submissions so far this year can be found on our Top Sturvs page and there is no doubt that Gongo Aso deserves to be the most voted-on item (ahead by a large margin).

One issue of concern is our frequent addition of content from major Nigerian sources (e.g. newspaper websites and Youtube) and how these push user submissions off the Latest Sturvs page. We will be conducting an experiment to see how much user content will be on the Latest Sturvs page and how often content will be submitted if we slow down our import rate or pause it altogether. Hopefully this will encourage users to submit articles if they know that their submissions will spend enough time on the Latest Sturvs page to be seen by others before falling off.

Right now the average amount of time a submission spends on the Latest Sturvs page is 8 hours and for the home page (Hot Sturvs) 4 days. In other words any submission that makes it to our home page gets 4 days of free advertising.

Sturvs has broken through the 100,000 mark on Alexa with a current traffic ranking of 97,669. This is only a month and a half after we broke through the 200,000 mark. This means Sturvs is now in the top 100,000 websites in the world. This might seem like an achievement but we still aren’t stopping here. 50,000 is our next target!