studyabroad.com Newsletter - Volume 14

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WHAT'S NEW

E-Mail Subject Line

You may have noticed something new about some of your e-mail inquiries. Messages now have a subject line which reads, "Inquiry from studyabroad.com listing," when they are sent to you via the "mail-to" link in your free listings (this is where your e-mail address appears as a hypertext link, and most web browsers create a blank e-mail message addressed to you). This subject should appear whether or not you are a studyabroad.com advertiser, but only from the inquiries originating from your free listing. Many of our listings still do not contain e-mail addresses. Please check your listings. If we are missing your e-mail address, please let us know. Students tell us that they prefer to make contact via e-mail.

New Country Page

Cuba Due to several programs being submitted to us in the past few weeks, we have added a new country page: Cuba. We previously had 1 or 2 listings for Cuba which appeared on our "Caribbean Other" page.

Our Trophy Case

We would like to call your attention to a graphic at the bottom of the studyabroad.com home page. Here you will find the awards which we have received. These include: Webcrawler Select, Starting Point Hot Site and Educational Site of the Day, the Worldspeaker Virgil Award, Infoseek Select and Magellan 3 star site.

Rotating Banners

We have recently begun working with Petry Interactive (http://www.petrynetwork.com) as a website affiliate. Petry supplies advertising banners to us for national advertisers which are rotated through several of the "menu" pages on our site (i.e. Search by Country). Please be aware that our agreement with Petry is quite flexible and these banner positions, as well as banner positions on our listing pages, are available on a page-by-page basis. Please contact us if you are interested in sponsoring a menu, country, language or subject page.

GENERAL INQUIRY DISTRIBUTION LIST

About 2-3 times per day, we receive general inquires from students interested in study abroad and language study. We would like to give you, the sponsors of study abroad programs, the opportunity to see these inquiries, and to respond to any which are in line with your offerings. We intend to bunch the messages together and send them out once or twice a week via an e-mail distribution.

We will not be able to screen inquires on an individual basis; that is you will need to take a look at all of the messages to find which are appropriate for your offerings. However, we believe that a small investment in your time will give you a "no-cost" source of leads, and will help us all better serve students who are looking for information.

We will get this list started just as soon as someone subscribes, so let us know if you would like to take part. To sign up, send a message to webmaster@studyabroad.com, with "subscribe" as the subject line.

SUNY NEW PALTZ IS MASTER SPONSOR

Studyabroad.com is proud to announce that SUNY New Paltz has joined us as a Master Sponsor. New Paltz has been advertising with us for over a year with Standard Listings, but has just upgraded their service so that their hot button now appears on our Home Page and on our Search pages. New Paltz is the second SUNY campus to become a Master Sponsor, joining Brockport, which went on our home page last spring. The SUNY system as a whole also has a Master Sponsor position on our home page. We thank everyone involved with the SUNY system for their support!

I-COMMERCE

We have entered into an agreement with EVS, Inc., a financial services processor to handle credit card processing over the net. EVS uses a secure server technology from Cybercash. The Cybercash encryption technique is comparable to Netscape╒s secured server. EVS is offering limited (you can only offer up to two "products") i-stores with no set-up fees to introduce this service (you will need to pay an application fee [about $200] to the bank as well as per transaction fees). This service can be used to handle application fees in conjunction with on-line applications. Visit the EVS web site at http://www.freeinternetstore.com for more information or contact Mark Shay at studyabroad.com to discuss implementing an on-line application/credit card processing system.

NEW ADVERTISERS

One Site...
One hundred countries...
Thousands of listings...
Millions of hits...
...endless possibilities.

Several months ago we began using the phrase above on our printed materials. One fact which we left out is that we now have more than 165 advertisers, including the biggest names in the study abroad world. We would like to thank each of the organizations which have supported us during the past 18 months, including the following new advertisers which have joined us since our last newsletter:

Actilingua Academy
Alhambra Instituto Internacional
AHA International
Ben-Gurion University
College Year in Athens ║Eastern Michigan University - Cultural History Tours
FORSPRO
George Mason University - Center for Global Education
HECUA
Humboldt State University (IELI)
Institute for European Studies/Institute for Asian Studies
International Studies Abroad
Interstudy
ITESM
Marist College (Summer Bridge Program)
Marshall University - ESL Institute
Snow College (Intensive English Program)
South Africa Field Program
Trinity Christian College - Semester in Spain
University of Wisconsin - Platteville
The Washington Center for Internships & Academic Seminars

TRAFFIC REPORT

Once again, the number of pages served by studyabroad.com continues to grow. Keep in mind that the numbers quoted below are "pages" of information (not "hits" which is often a number which includes each graphic as well as each page of text) and that our listing pages each contain many listings.

Following are the number of pages served month to month for the past year. Just below you will find the pages served for the same month in the previous year, where available.

A new statistic we are providing this time is unique hosts. This number reflects the number of "computers" which accessed pages on our site. This is roughly the number of individual users who visited our site. This figure is only available for months starting in October of 1996, when we began using a new log analysis utility.

Traffic in Total Pages Served:

February 1997: 204,217 (unique hosts: 37,822)
February 1996: 59,562

January 1997: 200,764 (unique hosts: 38,020)
January 1996: 36,487

December 1996: 115,566 (unique hosts: 23,364)
December 1995: 29,747

November 1996: 192,587 (unique hosts: 37,213)
November 1995: 21,048

October 1996: 157,726 (unique hosts: 29,774)
October 1995: 12,943

September 1996: 149,185 September 1995: 2,115

August 1996: 95,543

July, 1996: 68,427

June 1996 (estimated): 63,434

May 1996: 77,481

April 1996: 84,891

March 1996: 79,580

TOP TEN LIST

Following are the top ten universities in terms of usage of our system for the months of January and February. Shown is the number of pages requested from our server by users from each domain.

January 1997

  1. University of Minnesota: 1540
  2. Northwestern University: 1390
  3. University of Virginia: 1336
  4. University of Texas - Austin: 1087
  5. Harvard University: 774
  6. Pennsylvania State University: 769
  7. University of California - San Diego: 687
  8. Dartmouth College: 658 (tie)
  9. University of Michigan: 658 (tie)
  10. University of California - Los Angeles: 634
  11. Stanford University: 599

February 1997

  1. Stanford University 2609
  2. University of Texas - Austin: 1770
  3. Pennsylvania State University: 1052
  4. University of Minnesota: 987
  5. University of Virginia: 898
  6. American University: 892
  7. Princeton University: 708
  8. Columbia University: 705
  9. Duke University: 704
  10. Harvard University: 701

SEE YOU IN VANCOUVER

Just a bit of early warning...studyabroad.com will once again be represented on the exhibit floor at the NAFSA Annual Conference (May 19-22 in Vancouver). We look forward to meeting all of our old and new friends, so please make plans to stop by and say "hi." This year we will be showing off both studyabroad.com, and our new sister web site, GRADSCHOOLS.COM. We'll give you more information on our exhibit in our next newsletter.
studyabroad.com
265 E. Dutton Mill Road
Aston, PA 19014
USA

(610) 364-0400
http://www.studyabroad.com

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