SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
NCommander
on Friday June 27 2014, @06:15PM
from the finally-an-NCommander-post-with-<1k-words! dept.
from the finally-an-NCommander-post-with-<1k-words! dept.
So, given we've recently managed to find a good middle ground on the subscription front, I thought it would be nice to end the week with a lighthearted subject most of you care about.
STATISTICS!
As most of you are likely aware, we've been running piWik on SN for the last few weeks to get a better idea of what our general traffic looks like. We've learned quite a few interesting things from it, and I figured the community would love to take a look at the report itself. So, without further ado: piWik Statistics Report for mid-June. (warning: PDF file, the HTML output had far too many images to easily copy it off piWik and rehost it somewhere else, and there was no ASCII report that I could find).So, hopefully now most of you have taken a good look through the PDF. Its been fascinating watching the various trends of traffic, as well as getting an idea of the breakdown of mobile/desktop, various OS usage, and so-forth. First, a couple of notes:
STATISTICS!
As most of you are likely aware, we've been running piWik on SN for the last few weeks to get a better idea of what our general traffic looks like. We've learned quite a few interesting things from it, and I figured the community would love to take a look at the report itself. So, without further ado: piWik Statistics Report for mid-June. (warning: PDF file, the HTML output had far too many images to easily copy it off piWik and rehost it somewhere else, and there was no ASCII report that I could find).So, hopefully now most of you have taken a good look through the PDF. Its been fascinating watching the various trends of traffic, as well as getting an idea of the breakdown of mobile/desktop, various OS usage, and so-forth. First, a couple of notes:
- For whatever reason, piWik groups Ubuntu separately from Linux, and it shows up as "Unknown" in the OS families list. I think this is a side-effect from one of the plugins we're using, but I'm not 100% sure.
- Second, there are no referrals listed in the report; I specifically excluded them. There are two simple reasons: we get almost no inbound traffic from third-party sources (our top referral was Google searches at 114), and secondly, a fair number of users here have custom launch portals for themselves (basically an HTML page with links), who, due to our virtually non-existent referrals, show up in the top 25.
- HTTPS traffic is excluded due to certificate issues, as there are users who have DNT set. If you use NoScript, it sets DNT automatically, even if you enable scripts globally. Furthermore, my original post about non-JS users being excluded was in error, there is a hidden image that cause those users to show up.
- A few pages on the site don't include the footer template, causing hits to be slightly lower than they should be because of that.
So, with any bunch of data, we can start to draw some reasonable conclusions from it. Here's what I got, I'd love to hear your opinions below:
- Slashcode's internal statistics monitor is badly out of touch of reality; it reports our traffic is 80% higher than piWik does. This might be an artificat of bitrot, varnish, or something else entirely.
- I was kinda shocked to see how much of our traffic is based in the United States, I honestly though we had a more even distribution.
- The lack of referrals is concerning; right now, we're roughly stable with the users in our community, but if you don't already know we exist, you aren't going to find us easily.
There's probably a lot more I could draw from this data, but I don't want to color the communities' impressions beside stating the obvious, so I'd like to hear what you think about it, and then go from there.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
SoylentNews Site Stats: June 27th, 2014
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 78 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
You'll be sorry...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Friday June 27 2014, @07:47PM
The main reason for there being fewer posts over the weekend is that we receive fewer submissions, not because there are fewer members visiting the site. If the submission rate were to stay the same as during the week then the stories would go out at exactly the same rate also. To be honest, although we can see the reduction in both page hits and comments at weekends, we are less driven by those figures than we are by the number of submissions available to us.
The submissions start to drop off around mid-day Eastern US time on a Friday. It is not, of course, a sudden stop but a gradual slowing down. So whatever we have in the queue at the end of the US working day is often the vast majority of what we have to play with over the weekend. We will get a few more subs over the weekend but not a large number. The editorial team is geared up, when the submission queue gets critically low, to start collecting stories themselves but, even so, the eds also want to enjoy at least some of the weekend and they have the usual personal and social commitments. Another cause of the lower output is that it is SN editorial policy that editors do NOT release stories that they themselves have submitted. So, having collected stories ourselves, we are still reliant on another editor to release them to the story list. While this might seem an unnecessary burden, it does prevent any abuse of the system by editors. There are exceptions to this rule e.g. an alert requiring software be updated immediately (compromised encryption etc) or events that are of such importance that they need to be pushed out immediately.
In an ideal world, the submissions would pick up again first thing each Monday morning but this is not the case. It is often well into Monday afternoon before the submissions begin to flow at anything like a reasonable rate. This is reasonable - on returning to work there is often much to be done before anyone has time to make a submission. So there is a 60 hour or so period when there are few submissions for us to work with.
There is no way we could 'save stories for the coming week', even if we wanted to. Very often we can be scraping the barrel by Sunday afternoon and evening - a fact that some have commented on in no uncertain terms - and it is unfortunate that for some stories at least the quality suffers. We have increased the number of editors over the last week or two and this has been a considerable help in manpower terms, but the bottom line is that we need submissions in order to keep the front page filled. This is, without doubt, a much harder nut to crack.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Friday June 27 2014, @08:33PM
I've submitted 9 today and have a couple more, but that's only a quarter of the weekend needs assuming 20 a day. Less if you include half of Monday as the weekend. I think that's the most I've submitted in one day so far.
I think just posting slightly less stories at weekends is fine, even of it's only been happening due to lack of stories. If SN posts links to news for discussion, there is going to be less at weekends as less news in general is going to be posted at weekends. It being the summer in the northern hemisphere doesn't help as, in the UK at least, less stuff to report on happens.
What could help is getting a backlog of non "news" topics and using them as a regular "feature" at weekends. For example, every Saturday at 11am gmt post a book review, every Saturday at 6pm post a film review. These can be collected over time so you always have something to post. And it doesn't matter that it was written a few weeks ago as it is original content so unlikely to be 'stale'. Other review topics could be video games, tabletop games, gadgets, software etc. You could even ask ncommander to publish a weekly site update to go up Monday morning :-)
(Score: 1) by zizban on Friday June 27 2014, @08:48PM
That's a great idea! Submit us one.
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Friday June 27 2014, @10:14PM
I have two kids so could give you an interesting review on books for toddlers as that's all I really read...
It is something I have thought about before so I might do if I get the time to read/watch something in the first place.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday June 28 2014, @07:36AM
You many recall that this was tried in the very early days of SN. It did not receive much support at that time, but perhaps it is worth another try. Come back Tonya_Servo - we need you!
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by monster on Monday June 30 2014, @01:00PM
About posting stories, I've noticed that, unlike other versions of Slashcode, there is no "submit also to front page" option in the journal. I've browsed other people's journals sometimes and it seems like sometimes there are good candidates to the front page. Do the editors look among them when populating the submissions queue?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday June 30 2014, @02:10PM
Personally, I don't go searching through the 4000+ possible journals looking for stories. Others might. If you want your journal posted I would suggest that it is submitted in the usual way. It would be hard for an editor to know if a journal entry was complete, what the original source was (and therefore its authenticity), and to make sure that it didn't change once published.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by monster on Monday June 30 2014, @02:40PM
Fine, I'll do that. Thanks!