Techdirt 2010: The Numbers.
from the happy-new-year dept
2010 was a great year for Techdirt. We thought we'd share some stats about 2010 with all of you (and yes, we're a little late on this but we finally got around to pulling together the numbers).We posted 3,798 stories, generating 152,683 comments. According to Google Analytics, Techdirt had 11,490,135 visits in 2010. So, if Techdirt were a National Park (and you readers were visiting us in real life), we'd be the #3 most popular park in the country, just behind the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Or if we were a museum, we'd be well ahead of the top ranked Louvre, who only did a paltry 8.5 million visits last year. Yes, I know those are unfair comparisons but it's still a fun way to view things in perspective. Of course, if any of you really do want to visit us in real life, we'd love to have you.
Separately, the traffic numbers represented continued growth over the course of the year. If we're just looking at our December numbers, traffic in December of 2010 was 62% higher than in December 2009, and that was after continued growth throughout the year. So, it looks like we ended the year with a lot more folks here in the community than we started with, which is always a nice thing.
While certainly a large part of our traffic is US-based, the community here really is quite global with visitors coming from an astounding 230 different countries or territories (and yes, we did recently have a discussion about how there were fewer countries than that in the world, but Google Analytics counts "territories" too -- so a big shout out to you, the one visitor from Christmas Island).
Not surprisingly, the top four countries were all English speaking countries (US, Canada, UK and Australia) but Germany clocked in at number 5, followed by the Netherlands, India, France, Sweden and Spain. After India, Japan was the leading Asian country, which narrowly beat out China. Brazil was the leading South American country, topping Argentina by a decent margin. In Africa, not too surprisingly, South Africa was tops with Egypt coming in second. Of course, it looks like we did not get visits from every country in the world. Among those with no visitors at all were North Korea, Western Sahara & Chad. Pretty much every other country I checked had at least one visitor, though there may be some tiny Pacific Islands that I'm unaware of that didn't send any visitors and which I can't easily spot on the map.
Within the US, just looking at states, our top visitors were from California and then New York (with Texas close behind). The state that sent the least number of visitors? Wyoming. Not like anyone lives there anyway (kidding Wyomans, kidding). If we look at the top cities worldwide, New York dominated in terms of visitors, with a surprise second place finish from London, beating out all other US cities (perhaps less surprising taking into account population totals). San Francisco, LA and Chicago round out the top five. DC comes in at number seven. Sydney, Australia is the second non-US city and number 9 on the overall list.
Most of you still use Windows, followed by Mac and Linux pulling up in third place. iPhone visitors topped Android visitors (2:1) but I would bet that's going to change over the next year. Firefox was the most popular browser. Internet Explorer (?!?) eked out a tiny victory over Chrome, though I can't imagine that staying true much longer.
In any case, thanks to everyone for making Techdirt the thriving community that it is. Here's to a great 2011.
Top Ten Stories, by Unique Pageviews, on Techdirt for 2010:
- Best Buy Firing Employee Because He Makes A Funny Video That Doesn't Even Mention Best Buy - July 2nd
- The 19 Senators Who Voted To Censor The Internet - November 18th
- 'Hollywood Accounting' Losing In The Courts - July 8th
- Facebook Threatens Greasemonkey Script Writer - March 25th
- Why Congress Isn't So Concerned With TSA Nude Scans & Gropes: They Get To Skip Them - November 18th
- Guy Building A Working (Yes, Working) Computer Inside A Video Game - September 29th
- RIAA Accounting: Why Even Major Label Musicians Rarely Make Money From Album Sales - July 13th
- Why The Wikileaks Document Release Is Key To A Functioning Democracy - December 1st
- Sony Deletes Feature On PS3's; You Don't Own What You Thought You Bought - March 31st
- More Casinos Succeeding With The 'That Jackpot You Won Was Really A Computer Glitch' Claim - June 7th
- UK Hairdresser Fined For Playing Music Even Though He Tried To Be Legal - 599 comments
- Defining Success: Were The RIAA's Lawsuits A Success Or Not? - 417 comments
- The 19 Senators Who Voted To Censor The Internet - 401 comments
- Four Years In, How Successful Has Hollywood's Attack On The Pirate Bay Been - 376 comments
- Can Someone Explain Why Circumvention For Non-Infringing Purposes Is Illegal? - 364 comments
- Is Intellectual Property Itself Unethical? - 337 comments
- Why Debates Over Copyright Get Bogged Down: Conflating Use With Payment - 315 comments
- Give A Man A Fish... And Make It Illegal To Teach Fishing - 302 comments
- Why Voting For COICA Is A Vote For Censorship - 300 comments
- Composer Jason Robert Brown Still Standing By His Position That Kids Sharing His Music Are Immoral - 292 comments
2010's Top Users, By Comment Volume
- Dark Helmet -2,278 comments
- Hephaestus - 2,277 comments
- nasch - 1,597 comments
- Richard - 1,539 comments
- Technopolitical - 1,265 comments
- Karl - 1,249 comments
- average_joe - 1,156 comments
- Rose M. Welch - 993 comments
- PaulT - 982 comments
- ChurchHatesTucker - 918 comments
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Winner!
2.Hephaestus - 2,277 comments
Ha! I kicked his ass!
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Re: Winner!
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*Slips Schwartz ring on finger and ignites slightly wobbelly phallis-like beam of energy*
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One day, Dark Helmet, One day...
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Just Kidding. Love your posts.
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I salute you, sir.
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Infographics... would've been nice.
That is all.
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Oh...it's the number of comments...not how loud they were. :p
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I have two jobs, actually, and a hobby that requires a great deal of time and energy as I'm trying to turn it into a profession. Fortunately, all three involve me sitting in front of a computer for long periods of time and I have a very cool boss that realizes that working his employees like a slave makes for a bad workforce....
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Cool Stats
I have some curiosity about the financial info and profitability of the site. ( How much did you make; where does it come from; what was the profit; etc.. ). It'd be very cluetrain manifesto-ish for ya'll to share that info.
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Re: Cool Stats
Daily Pageviews: 1,175,089
Daily Ads Revenue: $3,525.27
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Right. But the question is do we count the dangling chads or not?
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Next Year...
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Random evil thought
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You may also want to show your bounce rate. I suspect a lot of people are sucked into a single page and then back away. According to Alexa:
"The percentage of visits to techdirt.com that consist of a single pageview:"
80%
Average page views of 1.4
Site ain't exactly engaging people, just catching drive by people searching for other stuff.
It seems impressive until you realize how many people you didn't engage (about 9 million of your 11 million or so visitor).
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Oops.
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None of this is true. We increased almost every month. There was a spike in July, so the following two months were a little lower, but other than that each month was higher than the last.
Contrary to your theory, there was no "TSA bump." This should be kind of obvious from the fact that out of the top 10 traffic stories, only one was about the TSA.
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http://www.techdirt.com/search.php?q=tsa&tid=&aid=&start=30&searchin=stories
It isn't a question of a single story. It is a question of a group of stories over a very short period of time.
Then look at:
http://www.quantcast.com/techdirt.com
Pretty clear that right in mid November, there is a sudden peak. As that story has died away (even as you try to re-pump it every couple of days), traffic has died back down. Basically, you start out 2011 with about the same traffic you started 2010 with (open it out to a year to see, the "week" setting gives a pretty clear indication.
One of the great things about Quantcast is that it is using code you put on your pages, which means it is pretty accurate. You might want to consider putting that stuff private before you make your next big stats claim :)
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It isn't a question of a single story. It is a question of a group of stories over a very short period of time.
And yet, if you were correct that that drove traffic then (1) you would see more such stories in those top stories, but you don't and (2) after the TSA stories died down in December, you would see a decrease in traffic -- but we did not. Contrary to your claims, December had more traffic than November.
Pretty clear that right in mid November, there is a sudden peak. As that story has died away (even as you try to re-pump it every couple of days), traffic has died back down. Basically, you start out 2011 with about the same traffic you started 2010 with (open it out to a year to see, the "week" setting gives a pretty clear indication.
You are relying on data that is presented in a way that is not clearly readable, such that you are making a number of false assumptions. There was one day in November which had a large spike in traffic (not, mind you, for a TSA story), and that distorts the graph due to the scale of the graph.
As stated above, your assumption that traffic died down after that peak is incorrect. December was significantly larger than November and that's EVEN THOUGH the last two weeks of December are traditionally down times, due to the holidays, as they were again this year.
Finally, again, you amusingly cannot see the details on Quantcast due to the scale, but I can look directly at our actual log file data, and tell you that January of this year is up significantly from January of last year, despite your claims to the contrary.
One of the great things about Quantcast is that it is using code you put on your pages, which means it is pretty accurate. You might want to consider putting that stuff private before you make your next big stats claim :)
One of the better things about having the actual log files is that it's even more accurate, and does not rely on oddly scaled drawings that might confuse those who do not understand the data.
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I think I'm going to regret asking this, but was there one story that WAS responsible in Nov. for a significant traffic spike?
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Don't get too big a head. :) That story did well, but it was the 19 Senators story...
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/sarc
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I don't know who you are, but you should consider a career in politics....
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For comparison, CNN.COM, a news site, has a bounce rate of only 40%, and a time on site nearing 6 minutes (from the same source). Even the Drudgereport, which is all but 100% links off the site, has a lower bounce rate.
With an 80% bounce rate, people have one look at the page and leave. That is never a good thing, it would indicate that they were brought there by accident, by blind link, or perhaps by misleading search engine results. Considering that TD places high for things like "the pirate bay" and other related topics, it shouldn't be a shock that the bounce rate is so high.
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If it does, then the numbers are even worse, because that coiuld just be automated bots reading stuff that is never seen. So that 11 million could be 100 of us actually using the site, and the rest bots pulling pages and being ignored.
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Yeah, we had discussed whether or not it was worth including that. A large percentage of our readership never visits the actual site, and just reads it in RSS. Those numbers don't count in the total number of visitors at all, but significantly increase the number of people who actually read what we write.
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Think about it. Without people like me, this would have been a "wow, TD is great thread" with maybe a couple of dozen comments. Instead, I create a CWF moment, which keeps all you guys coming back.
TD knows.
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Also not true. As noted in this very post, comments is rarely a good indicator of actual traffic.
Nice theory, but factually incorrect.
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If you want to play the visit game, drudge gets more visits in a day than TD gets in almost the last two years. Scale is really important.
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Spam (hoping for one sucker out of a million) and other e-advertising aside, being able to engage that type of audience is something any content producer should be hoping to match.
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Wow, looks like this was a good year for this site. I kinda like that I stumbled upon it by sheer luck and circumstance. It's great to see a good community forming with the growth of TD. Good job Mike and co!
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LOL
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My .cx domain
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Oh and I have nearly 1000 comments? Not bad considering I usually only post here during downtime at work!
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Top commenter
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Just out of curiosity, how many (or what percentage) were from Oklahoma?
Also, I'm not sure whether to be happy that I made the top ten list, or sad that I didn't make the top five. :P
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Oklahoma was 30th on the list of visitors from a state, so in the bottom half... You can in after Utah, Kentucky and South Carolina, but beat out Alabama, Iowa and Nevada (among others...)
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