Whatever Stats 2007
Posted on January 1, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 18 Comments
Just in case you were wondering, some Whatever stats for ’07:
9,016,664 total unique visits for the year, for an average of 24,703 unique visits a day. As a comparison, last year had 6,128,869 total unique visits, for an average of 16,837 unique visits daily. So overall visitorship was up just under 50% for 2007, which is not bad when you factor in that the site was down, more or less, for two months.
Of course, in the real world, I didn’t get 24.7k visitors every day; some days were rather more, others rather less. Weekend numbers are typically somewhat lower than weekday numbers (because people aren’t bored at work then), and for some reason, Tuesdays are generally the highest attendance day of the week around here. Attendance also generally trended upward for the year: January had 666,000 unique visits, while December had 878,000. The single most-visited day was November 13, the day after I filed the Creation Museum report; it got 72.8k.
Since October the average weekday has had between 30k and 35k visitors, with occasional spikes into the 40k to 50k territory.
One of the reasons the site gets so many visitors is that the archives are unusually active; the top page gets the most traffic but certain pages just keep piling up the hits. “Being Poor” is still visited hundreds of times daily, as is the BaconCat entry; the Creation Museum entry looks like it’ll be a perennial as well. Writing entries are also particularly popular, especially the “Teen advice” entry and the “Writing advice for people who don’t want to be writers” piece. And every year in December the “10 least successful holiday specials” piece gets a lot of visit; it the Whatever equivalent of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.
Tracking individual entries is going to get a little more difficult now because WordPress generates pages dynamically, but I hope to figure out a way to track the requests as they come in so I know what’s getting hit.
Other stats: The most popular browser for Whatever visitors: Firefox 2.x, with 30% of visitors using that (IE 6 is second with 16% and IE 7 after that with 12%. Safari is barely three and a half percent. 1,705 visits were recorded by people using Lynx, which I think is kind of awesome. 65% of you are on XP, and 10% on a MacOS of some sort. Just 4.5% of you are on Vista, which should probably worry Microsoft; I get more visitors using Linux than Vista. More than 50 countries (by visitor domain) had folks providing at least 1,500 visits each, so here’s a shout out to Indonesia, Estonia and Ukraine. Howdy, y’all. Since the WordPress install on September 30, there have been 236 posts and 8,524 comments, which averages to two and a half entries and 90 comments per day, or alternately, an average of 36 comments per post.
In all, not a bad year for Whatever, even with the drama surrounding the Awful, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad MT4 Install, which still makes me sad because I really liked Movable Type and I wish I knew why it didn’t return my affections. But WordPress is doing all right for me.
My plans for Whatever in 2008: Well, pretty much keep doing what I do. It seems to be working, you know. The only major change at the moment is that all the author interviews and features I used to do on Ficlets or By The Way I’ll be transferring over here; I’ll have more on that, for the benefit of authors, editors and publicists, probably a little later in the week. Aside from that, I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing for — gawd — a decade now: Whatever I feel like. It’s a good plan. I’ll stick with it.
Well, a great many of us seem to like whatever you feel like doing. That doesn’t mean every day is a gem. But overall, I can’t complain.
What are you talking about? I am brilliant every single time.
Every. Single. Time.
Venerable Scalzi:
I’m certain JJS meant the day itself wasn’t always a gem. Your dancing monkey crew knows everything you do is brilliant. We’re just happy to hang around and keep the hideous arse candles lit.
I’ll second the notion that all Scalzi moments are precious gems. and all arse candles are, indeed, hideous,
Happy New Year, John. Thanks for the work you’ve put into this site. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.
-Drew
P.S. More Linux than Vista, that’s pretty cool. :-)
Happy New Year, Mr. Scalzi.
I need about 4 more new books from you this year if you could get on that. ;)
Some would argue that granite is as attractive as many gems or that weeds are just under appreciated flowers. I am of this school and think that even when you are suffering from suckage you are still pretty darn good. Kinda like the joke about how are pizza and sex alike. The punchline is even when they are bad they are still pretty good.
What am I a minority? I am running Netscape but saw no mention of them in the browser stats. Wait, I am a blue eyed blonde so of course I am a minority. Hold it I am running XP so I am in the majority too. Now I am confused. That totally puts me in the majority. But I know I am confused and that puts me back in the minority.
It might skew the stats for next year (once you figure out how to get them) but maybe some links to the more popular archives would be a good idea. Top Ten Archives menu added to the other menus on the right? I know I am going to search baconcats. I have already read and enjoyed being poor and the creation museum bits. Maybe another menu with stuff on writing.
Happy New Year to you too! :)
Yes please, links to the top archive would be appreciated. That or getting a search button that actually does something.
Happy New Year, John. Here’s to lighting those hideous arse candles for another year of great posts. Us… damn, can’t remember what Harlan called us all… anyway, we’re all here for the ride, and so far (IMHO) it’s been pretty fun, even when I get totally cranked by the comments. I think we need to come up with T-shirts for Scalzi’s Dancing Monkey Crew, or at least con ribbons.
Just curious, John — do you have similar year-end figures reaching back to 1998? For instance, could you tell us when you passed 100,000 UVs in a year, a million in a year, and so on?
Tim Walker:
I have figures only for as long as I’ve been with 1and1.com for my hosting, which was started in October ’04. That said, I would expect that the first time I cracked 1M uniques would have been in ’03. I would imagine that I would have broken 100k uniques in ’99, which would have been my first full year.
Wow, if I got that many hits I’d cover my blog in ads and quit my job.
Well, I just did one of those.
Are those browser numbers complete? It looks like 38.5% “other”. The threshold for separate mention was set at 3.5% by Safari, so there’d have to be a lot of other browsers below that level to add up to 38.5%.
I’d guess Netscape shows up as either Mozilla or IE, depending on which mode it’s using.
The low Vista numbers may reflect your readers’ tendency to read you from work rather than home and corporations’ reluctance to move to Vista. If Whatever attracted more home users, there would be a higher Vista level.
DPWally:
No, the browser numbers aren’t complete.
Oops, yeah, I was reading in reverse chronological order and got to that later. If you don’t have ads, you should at least add an “erase dumb comment” button.