Blog Notes: Shoot Out At the Fantasy Factory

Traffic, yageddit? Sorry, that's lame, but I've had classic rock on the brain since the Bron-Yr-Aur post.

TOP seems to have reached a certain stately maturity if our traffic is any indication. Take a look at the bar chart of our daily visitors over the past seven weeks or so:

Pretty consistent, eh? The flat patch on the left is when I was on vacation in August; the low point of each week is generally a Saturday, although a couple of them are Sundays; and the healthier bumps at the right represent the beginning of the school year, when summer's over, and Europe (20–30% of our readership) is back from holiday, and the world gets back to work again. We're slow in the summer and always ramp up again in the fall, although the last two weeks haven't yet reached the norm of last Spring. The lowest bar on this chart represents 10,008 visitors and the highest one 35,746.

By the way, these numbers are basically only relative. They tell me how I'm doing from day to day and week to week, but they really shouldn't be compared to anything else. I use two counting services, and the other one, which I pay for, is a good deal more subtle, although when all is said and done it agrees with this one to within a few hundreds. I have the metrics set to ignore visits of less than 30 seconds' duration (to avoid counting visits by avid readers who are just checking in to see if anything new has been posted), and it counts as a "new" visit anyone who hasn't visited in the past two hours. If that seems unfair, remember that some people check in only once every few days, or every week, or month, and scan down through lots of posts; they're under-counted, in the same way that a guy who visits three times a day is over-counted. Internet head counts are just very approximate, is all. The numbers are much less "reality-based" than magazine circulation numbers any way you cut it.

Also, I don't count views of separate pages on the site, only visits to the main page. Nor does the above chart include the ~15,000 or so people who have signed up to get full RSS feeds. Seems unfair to count them as readers—all of them, anyway—because some of them, I'm sure, click through to the site (where they'll be counted anew), and just because some others get the site via feed doesn't mean they actually read it.

I keep meaning to establish a habit of taking Saturdays off, given that Saturday is consistently our slowest day. But the darn thing is, I enjoy this.

Mike

Comments

[Miserere]

Mike, it must be an internet phenomenon, because on my blog Friday or Saturday are the lowest days, with Tuesday or Wednesday being the highest. I've played with posting articles on different schedules to see if it would affect readership cycles, but it doesn't, so now I just post whatever day of the week I want.

Whether you like it or not: Good job on the numbers! :-)

[Timo]

The other day, while I was tabulating my better photos by aperture/rating into a spreadsheet, I thought (again) that I might have enjoyed the life of a statistician.

Perhaps you as well.

[John Krill]

I think you're making a mistake by not counting those who go to the most current posting only. I use RSS and when I see a new posting I go directly to that post only.

You may have many like me who use RSS or something like it to know when you have a new posting. I just got through this posting but I will not visit the main page. Why should I? I've read or viewed everything else.

[Luke Smith]

You enjoy it, and we actually read it.

[Rory O'Toole]

I'm one of your European (Irish) RSS readers. I used to log into the main site, before I discovered RSS, and might have logged in a couple of times of day during my working hours (you know, when I get into the office at 7am, when I am bored and need coffee at 11, and again after lunch maybe). Now I just check the RSS feed in favourites, and if there's something new, I'll click through and read it. So to me this is a more accurate assesment than when you get a hit from me when I'm "just checking". On the other hand, I read some other blogs less often, and when I do, I might read two or three posts in one go - all under one "click". So, pretty hard to measure metrics accuracy I guess.

Incidently, my office job (tech support) is very metric based as far as upper management is concerned, but there is no metric that measure the wealth of experience and knowledge. So guys like me (10+ years) often have worse metrics than newbies - cos the experience cannot be measured compared to sheer numbers which stack up. I dislike metrics in this scenario.

On the flip side, for my "part time" job, being paid to take photographs (portraiture, weddings, etc), I too look at metrics - traffic flow that my website receives. Not that it gives me much information - hard to measure "word of mouth", which generates most of my business!

Rory

[Reid]

+1 on John's comment. I'm an RSS subscribe and usually click through to the post.

I also turned off AdBlock for TOP - not many sites get that.