It’s that time again! Well, it’s 11 days after that time again but screw you, I was feeling lazy. This time around I’ve included 80% more charts and graphs as I love charts and graphs.

Around a month ago I posted our December Stats and I was quite suprised - best month ever? Amazing! A lot of folks chalked it up to Craigslist ads (even though I specifically mentioned how it couldn’t be in the last stats post). Will this month do better? Worse? Let’s find out.

Yep, looks like we’re still growing! All the Craigslist ads I have out expired in December, so there is 0 input from there. My maths aren’t so good but that appears to be a 1.1% increase over last month. Interestingly enough, our site requests have gone down but our page requests have gone up. That means we’ve had a significant reduction in bots/spam/otherwise-non-humans yet still retained our traffic levels. Nice!

Here are some details I get each month:

Well, it looks like we’ve gone down in Unique IPs per day… only around 750 this month, from 950 last month. I was really hoping to break 1000, but losing all those bot connections probably was a good thing. :) 9000 visits per day is pretty good though - the average surfer looks at 10 different pages before leaving again.

So what time of the day do we get all this traffic?

10AM still seems to be the favorite! I have no idea why. How about we follow up with some search statistics. Shakira, our monthly top-ranker for everything Blitz, is no longer #1! She doesn’t even appear on the pie chart:

Unfortunately she’s been replaced by something even more bizzarre; Dragonball-Z and Marines. In fact, if you take a look at this list here, you’ll see that Shakira only got 8 search results through us!

You can also see that quite a few of our links are referrals or bookmarks; few people search for our content to find it. :)

ON TO SOME COMPETITION!

Here’s the day-of-the-week popularity charts. There’s no way to for sure tell which author is the most popular, so using this measuring stick we simply look at how many people logged into the site on each day of the week:

#1: Maristar Mondays! Congrats Maristar for being in the top 5 every single goddamn month.
#2: Pagz Wednesdays! I know we all totally love his Star Wars frame-by-frame review, but since he stopped doing those his stats seemed to have gone up. HMMM
#3: Beaton Fridays! Beaton Fridays are starting to get popular because she’s edging in on NSP’s comics.

But then there’s a second way of measuring! The following is a list of how popular each specific day was, getting us a handle on the most popular articles:

#1: Beaton’s Magna Cum Laude! Her first Blitzed foray into the world of comics was, by far, our busiest day of the month. Congrats! (We also had a Blitz technical update that day but I don’t count it as it never showed on the front page)
#2: Maristar’s Dreaming of Better Movies! This was also the launch of BlitzTehc, our nerdalicious subsite… However I’m not contributing those posts to the scoring total because BlitzTehc doesn’t appear on the main page. Three way ties are messy anyway.
#3: Ashblaster’s Robots and Bottle Tokes! The trippy youtube-clippings seem to be popular (and this article was the one with the Robocop music video/montage which was awesome).

Finally, there is a third metric for measuring the most popular articles: direct references. I don’t have a chart or a graph for this one, I have to inspect some complicated log files to get this data out properly. A direct reference is an article that is loaded on it’s lonesome - this doesn’t count main page views or glancing back through the archives, or even search requests. This only counts how many times each page has been specifically looked at. (For example, after you submit a comment you are taken to a page that lists only the article you have commented on; this would count).

Many search engine results will link to specific articles like this, and other websites commenting on a particular post of ours might have linked to a specific article. For these reasons this is my favorite metric for measuring article popularity:

#1: The Original four Shakira articles. Yep, we thought we shook off Shakira but she’s still here, clinging on to life. Damnit! I thought we lost her! Way back in the day (these articles are over a year old now) we used to post 4 articles per day, all on the same subject. Each of these individual 4 articles ranked higher than any other directly-viewed article in January.

Interstingly enough, “Side-Boob” has made an appearance in our logs (both as site referals and search results), and my animated side-boob picture happened to be on this page as well. It looks like our “Shakira” fanatacism my actually just be side-boob fanatacism this month!

#2: Non-Stop-Pop’s Super Blooper comic! This is the hilarious Superman spoof.

#3: Maristar’s Dashing through the Snow bus blog! Bus blogs always make the top-charts every month in some form or another.

Strangely enough, this month each of those top links were NOT from January! They were all older articles. Very strange indeed! I guess The Blitz’s classic stuff is better than the new?

A new stat I’ve just come up with isn’t really an accurate measure of anything; it’s how many times people have clicked on an Author’s name, to pull up their bio/list of their articles:

#1: Beaton! Congrats Beaton, I’m sure your #1 article of the month helped contribute to this.
#2: Weasel! Hooray for me!
#3: Foley. :(

Well, that’s it for this month - be sure to come back in a week or two and I’ll have February’s stats over-analyzed for you. ;)

Well, it’s a new month and that means our traffic figures are in again. I’m a sucker for graphs and pies, and when you combine the two… Hooooo boy.

I suppose there’s also a chance that some rich advertiser or sponsor might stumble across this article and be all impressed-like.

I’ve long been under the impression that the number one driver of web traffic is constant updates. When we take a few days off our daily visitors shrink dramatically, and it takes weeks to get back up to speed. For the last few months we have been churning out at least one article per day (and in several cases, more than one), and it’s done nothing but make a huge increase in traffic. HUGE.

For those wanting a reference, November’s stats were the first time I published anything publicly. Just a month ago we had 5,500 hits per day… This month…

It doubled.

That’s right folks, we’ve reached the magical 10,000 hits per day mark! I would chalk this up to the Craigslist ads for the writing positions, but in the past we never got jumps this large (in the graph below, you can see a small bump in May when we last had Craigslist ads up).

A common question I get is, “Sure, 10,000 hits per day is pretty good, but how many unique IPs?” Though the standard of web comparison is straight hits (because if your site draws in the same traffic several times a day, it usually means it’s a better site), I do see the allure to knowing exactly how many individuals are looking at your site. Well, I pulled the numbers, and it looks like…

950… per day!

So somehow we actually have an audience of around 30,000 people. Including spambots and search engine crawlers, but 30,000 people a month are reading these articles. Plus, our content is interesting enough that the average visitor looks at 10 articles per day! (or refreshes the site 10 times waiting for a new article to appear!)

If you can’t tell from my liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks, I’m pretty excited.

Getting down to some nitty gritty details, the site traffic has been solid all month long except for the few days surrounding Christmas, which is understandable. No sudden spikes when the craigslist ads were posted, just one constant churning of daily visitors.

Our busiest days (and by one measure, the most popular articles of the month) were:

#1: December 10th - My The Blitz Safety Video. Keep that in mind, fellow writers; our readers enjoy us making fools of ourselves in front of the camera.
#2: December 9th - Non Stop Pop’s Tap the Rockies Halloween trilogy of comics! Nonstoppop always generates a lot of traffic for us. Glad to have you guys :)
#3: December 14th - This one is our first triple-day winner! 3 posts went up on the 14th… Pagz’s We all wear masks article… Again, my dislike for the picking apart of a Lucas film doesn’t seem to measure into the popularity contest. Then our new writer, Ashblaster, skewed the results by posting our 1000th post, Anarchy for the Masses, as well as his describing-his-snail-post Uzumaki. A tri-fecta of goodness!

However, the most hit individual article pages (a different measure of most popular articles) were:

#1: December 3rd - Maristar’s Bus Blog #9! Congratulations Maristar on our Sunday feature.
#2: November 20th - Maristar’s Kittens and Kubes! That’s right, for the first time EVER in TDB history, an article from the middle of a previous month STILL draws the most traffic! Talk about your success stories! Now we just need someone to top that with an article that stays on everyone’s mind for 3 months…
#3: December 5th - Foley’s Vote for the Bus article. This one got a lot of local-to-Victoria google hits!

Interesting how our two top-3 lists didn’t coincide whatsoever.. So much for statistical accuracy. :)

The most visited days of the week (and by one measure, the most popular authors) are:

#1: Saturday: Non Stop Pop’s scheduled comic day is once again at the head of our busiest day of the week.
#2: Friday: Boda and Beaton are two of our newest writers, and they both came out with the #2 position!
#2: Sunday: Tied for second is Maristar’s Bus Blogs are always a popular day.
#4: Monday: A three way tie! Maristar again for Monday…
#4: Thursday: Ashblaster and Master of Disaster, as well as
#4: Wednesday: Pagz!
#7: Tuesday: And bringing up the rear… Is lowly liddle ol’ Me.

Now that I’m linking your names, you might want to spruce up your bios a bit :P

Our hourly traffic has stopped being so random; 10AM Pacific Time is now our busiest hour, with a smooth slope on either side down to the slowest time, 9PM Pacific Time. We used to have a spike at midnight, but no more!

Google is our biggest referrer, with MySpace and Craigslist following up. Our natural connections however (bookmarks and direct URL typings to find us) still outweigh all 3 combined, so we’re not so random! We appeared to get a lot of google searches for items we did articles on… Yes, including Shakira, who tops the list yet again this month.

And a minor techy detail; we served up 10 gigs of info in December, 50% of which was graphics.

A lot of people seem to think nobody reads the Blitz anymore, and I can definitely see why. Our commenting level has gone down (no more posts from Fozzie or Gwydion, which used to spark debates), which is what most people use as a measuring stick for their post popularity. Unfortunately, comments can’t be the measuring stick used! It turns out we have a multitude of people lurking in the background…

So I’m going to make publicly available our site stats!

One thing to note during these stats - I have removed all statistical tracking software and Google site submission plug-ins from the site, so there is literally no advertising or search engine submission going on. I have no meta tags or keywords. In other words, I am doing absolutely nothing to promote site growth.

November was our best month ever, following our relatively slow yet still decent September/October (due to site upgrades, design changes, and lazy writing).

For those that are curious, our busiest visiting hour is 7:00 to 8:00 AM, Pacific Time, closely followed by the midnight to 1:00 AM hour (when we publish our new articles). Our slowest hour is 3:00 to 4:00 AM, but the afternoon hours are also pretty slow (2:30-7:00 PM).

I used to publish a “What’s the most popular article?” section, which was quite popular. But due to the new site format, with all the articles on one page, it’s fairly difficult to track this accurately. Using the old method (direct article hits):

Most popular articles for November:
#1: Pag’z Star Wars Dissection. I have no idea why this is number one - it has no fancy pictures, it has no comments - but it was directly viewed twice as much as the below. I have to admit, I don’t really like the Star Wars Dissection personally, but congrats to Pagz I guess!
#2: The chocolate pizza comes in second place, narrowly squeaking ahead of the below article. I gotta say this article was delicious looking.
#3: The Wickerman movie review almost made it to second place! Congratz Maristar!

Like I mentioned, however; the above stats can’t really be trusted because it doesn’t count articles read from the main page, which is where most people will be reading them (especially if they aren’t commenting). So, I’m going to try out a simple… Busiest day = #1, second busiest day = #2, etc.!

Busiest Days of November:
#1: Nov. 20th’s Kittens and Kubes takes the #1 spot! Clearly a crowd favorite what with all those cute pictures of cats. Congratulations Maristar!
#2: Nov. 18th’s Some like it Hot, an excellent Non-Stop-Pop comic draws in the second largest crowd for the month.
#3: Nov. 4th’s The Emperor’s New Clothes is another Non-Stop-Pop comic!

Now the busiest-days method is also a bit inaccurate because people may naturally visit more often Saturdays anyway, but the fact that Monday’s Kitten and Kubes came out on top proves that our readers… Like barfingly cute articles.

Speaking of days of the week, Wednesday is officially the busiest day! Again, no idea why. We have no scheduled authors for Wednesday at this time so it’s just a fill-in spot. =) Saturday is second busiest, followed by a very close 5-way tie with Friday eeking just 8 hits ahead of Monday.

Top 5 search referrals:
#1: “Shakira”, of all things, is our #1 search request.
#2: “Dear Maggie”, though she hasn’t had an article for ages, is #2!
#3: “DragonBall Z” is our third search request for some reason.
#4: “I am bender please insert girder” has been a common sight - every single month this shows up in the top 5 list somewhere.
#5: “Postsecret” (which maristar did an article on) and “Hell pizza condom” are both tied for 5th place. I don’t know what kind of pizza that person got but maybe they could take a picture and mail it to postsecret?

I’ve always been trying to push the “50% Firefox” audience and we’ve always hovered around 60-70%. I haven’t checked in several months but I’m disappointed for November: