Tuesday April 22, 2008

Parabolic

Just passed the third anniversary of this’ere blog (that’s right — old enough to be your blog great-granddaddy), and so I was looking at some site stats, and the above graph struck me. We’re looking at page views per year, and while the numbers may be impressive, the trend is not. Extrapolating the numbers for 2008 out, we get 4,257,150. In other words, the difference between 07 and 08 is smaller then the difference between 06 and 07. That’s all kinds of bad — slowing growth, a gradual leveling off of readership.

On the other hand, this is all a bit of an oversimplification. Growth happens in fits and spurts and most of those come in the second half of the year, for whatever reason. And while my stats program doesn’t track unique IP stats (arguably a more accurate indication of readership), they have been growing more dramatically: 54,522 last May, 210,437 in March. Who knows what it all means.

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  1. Michael    Tue Apr 22, 09:00 AM #  

    Keep in mind also, you have over 200 subscribers to your RSS using Google Reader. If you’re looking at pageviews, your RSS feed may not even be counted. And if it is, aggregators like that won’t show each person who reads the site.



  2. squathole    Tue Apr 22, 09:58 AM #  

    What it all means is you’re wasting too much time blogging and not getting laid nearly enough.

    But to be fair, you could substitute any gerund at all in that sentence for “blogging,” and it would still be true.



  3. G    Tue Apr 22, 10:59 AM #  

    It means that Stuck on the Palmetto was driving traffic to your blog. Losing SOTP probably stung most, if not all, blogs in South FL (and the new three-posts-a-day SFDB isn’t as effective).

    g from tally



  4. alesh    Tue Apr 22, 11:44 AM #  

    Michael~ it all comes out in the wash. How do RSS readers read comments?

    squathole~ whadya know how much I get laid.

    G~ Traffic actually increased a little bit after SotP went away. Not much, but it was there.



  5. Rick    Tue Apr 22, 04:45 PM #  

    Traffic actually increased a little bit after SotP went away. Not much, but it was there.

    Yeah, well, probably didn’t have anything to do at all with all the muckraking Carlos and Manny were doing here after it went dead. Nothing at all.

    And, yeah, I’m still bitter. Does it show?

    .



  6. Rick    Tue Apr 22, 04:50 PM #  

    BTW, the site is loading slower than ever.

    Are people getting tired of waiting for the load?

    .



  7. alesh    Tue Apr 22, 06:27 PM #  

    Rick~ Maybe. I thought it was more of a “what do I do now? I guess I’ll have to go visit that other blog” sentiment. Is it really? It’s been loading pretty well on my end. I’ll poke around under my hood a little more this weekend (my web host kind of wants me to, too).



  8. Rick    Tue Apr 22, 07:23 PM #  

    I think you have a very loyal core of readers, Alesh, that help you maintain a constant and predictable number of visits/page views. If you look at the stats, my thinking is that “core number” was supplemented by whatever traffic was directed your way by SotP (born in 2005) as well as whatever resulted, I think, from a general feeling of “community” that SotP generated among SoFla bloggers.

    With the demise of SotP, I think that “community” feeling has diminished somewhat and has thus reduced the amount of movement from blog to blog amongst readers resulting in a lower number of visits not only for you, but for many others I would be willing to bet.

    Just a theory. But something I was thinking about when I came up with the concept for SFDB.

    .



  9. Alex Cabrera    Tue Apr 22, 07:37 PM #  

    “54,522 last May, 210,437 in March”

    Those are some pretty impressive numbers.



  10. Michael    Wed Apr 23, 09:25 AM #  

    True, readers using the feed will have to load the page to read comments, but most of the time, the comments aren’t important enough to open the page.

    No offense, y’all.

    But as you can see by the relatively static group of people commenting, it’s a small group who actively participate, but a much larger group who lurks.



  11. Carlos D    Wed Apr 23, 02:39 PM #  

    Several points.

    First off, for a local blog in a city with such a small populous of informed people, the numbers are fantastic.

    Second, your blogging style (more prone to link elsewhere then contain “extra goodies” after the jump) is prone to one pageview per visit reading.

    Third, I still have no idea where your “previous entries” button is.

    Fourth, your page titles don’t necessarily lend themselves to super organic page traffic.

    google: site:criticalmiami.com to see all your indexed pages.

    But yeah, I think you’re doing pretty well and should definitely consider running local ads instead of google adwords.