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SoylentNews Site Stats: June 27th, 2014

posted by NCommander on Friday June 27 2014, @06:15PM   Printer-friendly
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:
  • 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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by lhsi on Friday June 27 2014, @08:33PM

    by lhsi (711) on Friday June 27 2014, @08:33PM (#61068) Journal

    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 :-)

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
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  • (Score: 1) by zizban on Friday June 27 2014, @08:48PM

    by zizban (3765) on Friday June 27 2014, @08:48PM (#61079)

    That's a great idea! Submit us one.

    • (Score: 2) by lhsi on Friday June 27 2014, @10:14PM

      by lhsi (711) on Friday June 27 2014, @10:14PM (#61143) Journal

      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

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 28 2014, @07:36AM (#61285) Journal

    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.