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[Donate here](https://donate.stripe.com/3csg013LAa1w1ckfYY)

# Donations welcome

Yes we sell [Premium agency subscriptions](/article/subscribing-for-premium-agency-features). We are a for-profit business. But in truth this is an expensive venture. As of this writing (1/11/2025) it still costs more in web and database hosting costs alone to keep SHD running. There are countless other material costs that add up as well.

Beyond that there are three hungry hamster staffers who work very hard to grow and maintain the SHD service and [Discord community](https://discord.gg/4A3yYkJFwe). We don't want to continue doing this entirely for free forever.

We're committed to maintaining SHD's free services indefinitely. And with luck we'll get more subscribers over the next few years to cover costs. But in the meantime we can use all the help we can get. If you'd like you can help us out by [donating as little as a dollar](https://donate.stripe.com/3csg013LAa1w1ckfYY) to the cause.

Thank you to everyone who helps out in all the ways. Including this one. Cheers.


A brief request for donations from fans of SHD willing to help out

Donate to the Hamster Chow Fund

- [What is the Global stats page?](#what)
- [User content](#user-content)
- [Site usage](#site-usage)
- [Google searches](#google-searches)
- [Google views per month](#google-views-per-month)
- [Miscellaneous](#miscellaneous)


# What is the Global stats page? [#what]

For the most part the [Global statistics page](/stats) should be at least superficially self-explanatory. But you might be wondering what some of the numbers stand for. If you hover your mouse over any of the statistics you'll see a tooltip giving more explanation of what that number represents:

![Image](274c8b51-5df1-481a-91fc-8318122e5b9f)


# User content [#user-content]

This is really just basic content stats. How many stores, products, and such are there in total?


# Site usage [#site-usage]

These statistics reflect users visiting our site, in contrast with external activity like [Google searches](#google-searches). The page views are heavily skewed by the many bots (programs) out there that index or scrape this site. I try my best to filter out the page views that are done by such bots, but that requires them to declare themselves as such. Not all bots do. Hence my calling them "qualified", with this caveat being the qualifier.

The "link-outs" to Zazzle are most likely 100% human, owing to how I collect this information. Bots don't click on page links the way humans do.


# Google searches [#google-searches]

This is much more interesting information. "Views" in this context is more formally called "impressions". Meaning it showed up as a search result somewhere and the user might have seen it. [Read how Google defines impressions](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828?hl=en#impressions).

"Stores with views" is the most interesting statistic to me personally. It's really an accumulation of storefronts, products, designs, and collections that all show up in Google search results, grouped by store. At the time of this writing, 100% of stores have shown up in search results.

One important caveat though. Let's say you created a store a few minutes ago. You wouldn't expect Google to know about that right away. Google's webcrawler probably won't revisit our website for the better part of a week. And then odds are good it won't get to your store on that day. Google cannot visit all of a large website every time it visits that site. It can only get to part of it with each visit. A page it has not visited will not show up in search results. This tends to skew the numbers negatively.

So we add an "aging window". For the purpose of these Google stats, we pretend a store doesn't exist for the 2 weeks after it was created. At the time of this writing, a lot of new stores are brand new. So when I remove the 2-week aging window, this 100% figure drops to 94%. Which means that at least 6% of the stores here are under 2 weeks old.


# Google views per month [#google-views-per-month]

This is just summing up the daily total number of times during each month our pages showed up in Google searches. If the latest month seems low, keep in mind that it represents only part of the current month. We can't count tomorrow's searches. Not yet at least.


# Miscellaneous [#miscellaneous]

These are mostly here to give you a sense of some of the large numbers we deal with on a daily basis. It's interesting to see that at this time there are 74k products but there are about 640k images, mostly for those products. That's about 8.6 images per product. If you're feeling really nerdy, you'll be interested to know that they take up over 28 GB of storage space. Averaging about 44 KB per image.

If you're familiar with the [Trademark Search](/article/how-to-use-the-trademark-search) and [Trademark Analysis](/article/how-to-use-the-trademark-analysis-feature) features, you may find it interesting that there are over 4M trademarks in our database. That's how many active trademarks the [US Patent and Trademark Office](https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks) has made public, going all the way back to the mid 19th century.

The Zazzle niches number is relevant to users of our [Niche Explorer](/article/how-to-use-the-niche-explorer) and [Niche Analysis](/article/how-to-use-the-niche-analysis-tool) tools. This is how many Zazzle searches have been transformed into niche ideas. Zazzle publishes these for Google and other search engines as actual pages they should index and make available for search. As you can see, Zazzle tries to promote niches that hooked customers to make purchases on the premise that other people will be searching for the same things. And it's a big number.

A look at what the listed measurements represent and some details about how they are calculated

How to use the Global stats page

On some pages you'll see a note that reads "Zazzle may pay us for this affiliate link":

![Image](915829da-e83d-40dc-aee0-8d3c88493c54)

[Zazzle](https://www.zazzle.com/) has an [affiliate program](https://www.zazzle.com/sell/affiliates) through which they pay people to promote products. Affiliates like Snuggle Hamster Designs can earn up to 15% of the purchase price paid by someone who buys something from Zazzle as a reward for the link that brings a customer to them. The customer does not pay any extra for this. The price they pay for that product would be the same with or without this referral bonus payout.

Not every link from our site to Zazzle's affords us this option. Our [Premium agencies](/article/subscribing-for-premium-agency-features) get to use their own affiliate IDs to gain that bonus for themselves. And most times people clicking on these links do not result in any bonuses being paid to anyone.

We have this disclosure of the nature of this affiliate program mainly because the [Federal Trade Commission](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-101-social-media-influencers) and other government agencies think you are too dumb to realize that businesses do things for money.

Fuller details about Zazzle's affiliate program and how this website benefits from it

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