some cybersoc stats

I've been using statcounter on this blog for three months now. It's possible to make those statistics publicly available but I've always been concerned compromising the privacy and, potentially, the safety of visitors, particularly those from less than democratic countries which are a small but growing percentage of visitors here.

I've also recently noted that statcounter doesn't measure the number of people subscribed to or reading the various RSS feeds from this blog. I'm guessing that there are about 4-500 people subscribed and around 100 of those regularly read or at least have their RSS reader pull the newest content from my feedburner feed. There are also some old typepad generated RSS feeds with subscribers and I don't have any statistics at all for those.

Below is a graph (click to enlarge) the statistics for the last three months, taken from statcounter and not including RSS:

The graph shows a dip in traffic from September to October but this is largely due to a temporary spike from people who clicked through from the comment I left on the flickr photo of "pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone" which was responsible for around 20-25% of traffic in September.

In November, the number of unique users and page impressions were both up from October. What I find really interesting, and encouraging, is that the number of repeat visitors climbed steadily each month. Hopefully this indicates that in November 558 visitors found content that was interesting enough for them to remember the URL and come back again.

6101 visitors, which was the total for November, isn't a huge amount of traffic - it's 203 different visitors per day on average. But added to the number of people known to be reading the RSS, usually just over 100 per day, and it's a more respectable 300 (est) people per day.

Statcounter reveals that 40- 50% of visitors come from the UK, 20 - 30% from the US, with the remaining 20 - 40% of visitors split about evenly between the rest of the EU (Poland and France contributing most EU visits) and the rest of the world (with Iran, Dubai, Kuwait, and China contributing most). I almost never get visits from South America but have had visits from just about every other country.

When I check the stats first thing in the morning, almost without fail the most popular page is the category index for cybersex. After about 10.30am UK time, it tips back to the front page (eg. cybersoc.com) with the newer posts gradually filling the top 5 or 6 most popular pages. There's also still a signficant trickle of traffic through my posts about Netvocates, Mumsnet, and the internet libel category index.

On a typical day, most traffic comes from google searches using a wide range of search strings. A significant percentage directly type in the URL or come from inbound links not picked up by statcounter. Blogs linking to cybersoc.com can also send traffic, and in the past (although not recently) I've had as many as 6000 page views off a single link (I'm referring to the Daily Kos link and subsequent links from it's blog-eco-system).

As for technorati ranking, cybersoc.com has fallen from a high of 9337 on 31 August 2006 to today's level of 16,599. A few days ago it was at around 15,000.

So does any of this matter? Well, yes. I enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that there are people visiting and reading this blog. But I enjoy even more getting comments and emails from readers. It's also great when someone chooses to take the time to link from their blog to cybersoc.com. Would I keep blogging even if no one was reading? Probably. Would I blog more or differently if 1000 or 10,000 people a day were reading? Probably not.

Comments

[Graham]

I used to care about numbers. I think it shows a (mostly) healthy interest in your blog and who's reading it. I'm far more interested now in the connections I continue to make because of blogging. You're a prime example of this. What's most interesting to me about your blogging experience is the doors it's helped open for you. So, while some of us z list bloggers don't get Jeff Jarvis traffic, we often do get quality over their quantity. You've met and been asked your opinion on stuff by decision makers in big organizations as a direct result of certain people reading this 'ere blog. That's more interesting than the numbers game, methinks.

[Robin Hamman]

Absolutely Graham, it's the quality, not quantity of readers. Quality does make for a prettier statcounter graph though! ;-)