RateTea Experiences Sustained Growth: 318% Annually, 212 Times US Economic Growth, Year-End Report

Jan. 6, 2012 - PRLog -- RateTea, an interactive online community where anyone can rate and review teas, and a project of Merit Exchange LLC, experienced sustained and rapid growth in traffic and revenue during 2011.  The year concluded over 69,000 unique visitors, up from just over 16,500 during the prior year, 2010.  This represents a growth rate of 318% annually.  This growth rate is over 212 times larger than the annual growth rate of the US economy, the largest economy in the world, as measured in the third quarter, 2011, relative to 2010.

Sustained growth in multiple aspects of the site:

During this period of time, the number of distinct pages viewed on the site surged from 8396 to 18377, reflecting a combination of numerous newly published articles, newly listed teas and tea companies, as well as new members and their associated profile pages and tea reviews.

In 2011, a total of 549 new tea reviews were published, written by 81 different reviewers, and covering 109 different brands of tea.  RateTea now lists 287 different brands of tea in its database, which classifies teas into 161 different styles and 99 different regions.

Major milestones for RateTea in 2011:

During this year, RateTea also experienced many major milestones, including the addition of Sylvia Odhner to the RateTea team, fulfilling many different roles, including graphic designer and editor, and the acquisition of the domain name RateTea.com, which had previously been in the possession of Joshua Chamberlain of the Eugene, OR-based J-Tea International.  Accompanying the acquisition of this new domain, RateTea changed its branding from the older name RateTea.net to the new, more general, RateTea.

Under the guidance of Sylvia Odhner and leadership of site founder Alex Zorach, RateTea carried out a major site redesign, which was extraordinarily well-received by the general public, helping the site to break into a new category of legitimacy as an online authority on the topic of tea.  The site also made numerous improvements to the browsing and searching functionality, such as allowing filtering of teas by style, brand, and region of origin.

Visit the site:

http://ratetea.com

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RateTea is the web's authoritative resource on tea, a community where anyone can rate and review loose tea, teabags, and herbal teas, with a database of teas classified by brand, style, and region, and articles about tea, health, sustainability, and related topics.