Techdirt 2017: The Stats.
from the closing-the-books-on-2017 dept
Another yearly tradition is, after the new year, we try to take a look at some of the stats on traffic and commenters and such. I know many sites do this before the end of the year, but we're sort of a stickler for actually including the full year's data, so ours comes out sometime after the new year actually starts (and once I have time to really go through the data). For reference, you can see these stories from the past seven years as well: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010. As I've mentioned in the past, for comment data, we use our own internal logs. For traffic data, we're using Google Analytics, which... has its own problems -- and which I'm sure many people block. But as we're using it mainly for comparative purposes, it functions as a "good enough" tool for those purposes, even if it may not be entirely accurate.
Every year it's fun to see where visitors are arriving from -- and this year Google says visitors showed up from 236 different countries (down three from last year). Since we've been doing this, US traffic has almost always been right around 67% of all our traffic, but this year it bumped up to 70.13%. The UK and Canada remain neck-and-neck and basically tied for second place, with the UK edging out Canada 5.9% to 5.8%. Australia, India, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Finland, and Sweden round out the top 10. The big movers this year were India passing Germany and Finland jumping into the top 10 (leapfrogging over Sweden) and pushing New Zealand out of the top 10.
Going around the globe, after India, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Japan round out the top 5 in Asia. The new entrant here is South Korea who had been much lower in the past. In Europe, we've already named the top 6 in the overall top 10 list, but if you're wondering whose next: it's Ireland, Norway, Denmark and Spain. Russia appears to have dropped off the list -- despite quite a few stories mentioning Russia. Hmmm. In South America, Brazil represents exactly 50% of our traffic from that continent, followed by Argentina at 15%, Chile and Colombia each with 8%, and Peru at 7%. In Africa, last year we noted that in previous years most of our African traffic came from South Africa, with negligible amounts coming from elsewhere -- though we started to see traffic from Kenya and Nigeria last year. This year, South Africa still leads, but with just 40% of the African traffic. Nigeria has jumped up in a big way with 23%, followed by Kenya (7%), Egypt (5%), and Ghana (4%).
There's always some fun to explore down at the bottom of the list -- and this year we see things like one single visitor from North Korea -- which comes after two years of zero North Korean visits. Perhaps the country's internet is opening up after all (that's a joke for people who take things too literally).
As always, the country with the longest average duration visit is Gibraltar, and every year, PaulT takes credit for this as he should. Surprisingly, Bangladesh comes in second for duration on the site, and that's with a decent amount of traffic (over 10,000 visitors). If we're looking at larger countries with significant traffic, India, New Zealand and Canada seem to spend more time on the site than visitors from other countries.
As has been the case for a while, Chrome remains the most popular browser by far for visiting the site. While last year it broke 50% of all visits, this year it dropped to 48%. Safari is a strong second at 24%. Firefox checks in at 12%. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (4%) and Edge (2%) are barely noticeable -- though they still beat Opera at 0.6%. Windows is the top operating system at 41%, Android is second at 23%. iOS is (again) close with Android at 21%. Macs are 10% and Linux is 3%. Chrome OS shows up at 0.5%. And a miraculous 0.01% of you visited Techdirt on an Xbox. Really: you don't need to do that. I'm happy to see that I actually don't have very good data on what ISPs most of you are using, as it's showing up as "not set" for a bunch of folks, and the numbers on those who are revealing what ISP they're using aren't really big enough to determine very much. Hopefully, this means many of you are practicing good internet hygiene in cloaking information about your connection and what sites you're visiting.
For the past few years we've been posting the following chart of where our traffic comes from:
As I said last year, we pride ourselves on the fact that so many of our visitors come directly to the site, rather than relying on social media or search, like so many other sites do. Some argue that this means we're leaving traffic on the table by not focusing on pumping up social and search traffic. We like to believe we're building a more loyal audience who visits us because they like what we do -- and it also means we don't have to freak out every time a platform like Google or Facebook changes an algorithm. It's nice to see that our percentage of direct traffic has gone up this year, from 38.5% last year to 42.5% this year. Search traffic declined from 31.3% to 26.5%, while social went up a small amount from 17% to 18.1%.
For the sources that do send us traffic, however, Reddit leads the way (yet again), followed by Twitter and Facebook and Hacker News. Other specific sites that have sent us a decent amount of traffic include Instapundit, Drudge Report (though I think that was all from one story) and Popehat. For search traffic, most of the terms that sent a lot of traffic tended to be variation on "techdirt" -- showing how many people use the search bar for navigation these days. Two amusing search terms that ranked fairly high: "can you plagiarize yourself" and "louie louie lyrics." If you're wondering why we got a bunch of search traffic on that one, it's because of this 2015 story we did about the FBI spending years researching the lyrics trying to figure out what they mean and if they're bad -- before realizing that the Kingsmen must have submitted the lyrics to the Copyright Office.
And, with that, we move onto the big lists:
Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2017:
- Software Company Shows How Not To Handle Negative Review
- FCC Releases Net Neutrality Killing Order, Hopes You're Too Busy Cooking Turkey To Read It
- The FBI Is Apparently Paying Geek Squad Members To Dig Around In Computers For Evidence Of Criminal Activity
- Dead People Mysteriously Support The FCC's Attack On Net Neutrality
- Supreme Court Says You Can't Ban People From The Internet, No Matter What They've Done
- Cops Sent Warrant To Facebook To Dig Up Dirt On Woman Whose Boyfriend They Had Just Killed
- FCC Plan To Use Thanksgiving To 'Hide' Its Attack On Net Neutrality Vastly Underestimates The Looming Backlash
- Sean Spicer Launches Witch Hunt Over The 'Secure' App He Just Said Was No Big Deal
- Michigan Lawmaker Flees Twitter After Reports Highlight She Helped AT&T Push Anti-Competition Broadband Law
- Techdirt's First Amendment Fight For Its Life
2017's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:
- Techdirt's First Amendment Fight For its Life: 413 comments
- Our Humanity: 398 comments
- The FBI Is Apparently Paying Geek Squad Members To Dig Around In Computers For Evidence Of Criminal Activity: 358 comments
- Defending Hateful Speech Is Unpleasant But Essential, Even When Violence Is The End Result: 322 comments
- Nazis, The Internet, Policing Content And Free Speech: 288 comments
- More Legislators Jump On The Blue Lives Matter Bandwagon: 268 comments
- Case Dismissed: Judge Throws Out Shiva Ayyadurai's Defamation Lawsuit Against Techdirt: 259 comments
- One Twitter Account's Mission To Make White Supremacists Very, Very Famous: 256 comments
- Ajit Pai's Big Lie : 252 comments
- Techdirt Survival Fund: I Support Journalism: 248 comments
Okay, you've made it this far... so now we get to the part people are most interested in every year: the specific lists of individual commenters (well, registered commenters, at least). Obviously, we get a ton of anonymous comments or comments from people who put in usernames, but never register -- but we can't track those, so these lists are only to those who have actually registered.
2017 Top Commenters, by comment volume:
- That One Guy: 1839 comments
- PaulT: 1774 comments
- Roger Strong: 1527 comments
- Ninja: 1335 comments
- orbitalinsertion: 1122 comments
- Stephen T. Stone: 1101 comments
- Anonymous Anonymous Coward: 682 comments
- That Anonymous Coward: 680 comments
- Bergman: 666 comments
- MyNameHere: 657 comments
Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the light bulb icon: Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the lightbulb
- That One Guy: 328 comments (18%)
- Roger Strong: 239 comments (16%)
- PaulT: 191 comments (11%)
- Stephen T. Stone: 129 comments (12%)
- That Anonymous Coward: 111 comments (16%)
- Ninja: 102 comments (8%)
- Mike Masnick: 58 comments (17%)
- TechDescartes: 47 comments (17%)
- Anonymous Anonymous Coward: 46 comments (7%)
- Uriel-238: 42 comments (9%)
Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the LOL icon: Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the LOL icon
- Roger Strong: 138 comments (9%)
- TechDescartes: 74 comments (28%)
- Stephen T. Stone: 24 comments (2%)
- That One Guy: 24 comments (1%)
- That Anonymous Coward: 17 comments (3%)
- Toom1275: 15 comments (5%)
- Vidiot: 13 comments (9%)
- stderric: 13 comments (5%)
- Ninja: 12 comments (1%)
- MyNameHere: 11 comments (2%)
Okay. With that, the books are closed, and folks need to rev up their commenting engines to get a jump on 2018's list... See you in the comments.
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Filed Under: comments, the numbers, the stats
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traffic by country
Perhaps unique visitors by population percentage would be a different matter - after all, the real test is not how many read it, but what percentage. 10% of a tiny country reading it says more than 0.001% of a large one even if thats more people.
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And I really need to oil my comedy gears. Although it's hard to compete with lunacy ;)
Ahem.
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Re:
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Dang, I gotta start commenting more. 😄
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"Surprisingly, Bangladesh comes in second for duration on the site, and that's with a decent amount of traffic (over 10,000 visitors)."
But WHERE is your overall figure for unique visitors? The one I want. Do I just miss it after two careful scans?
Just percentages mean you're, ahem, "not being completely transparent"...
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Re: "Surprisingly, Bangladesh comes in second for duration on the site, and that's with a decent amount of traffic (over 10,000 visitors)."
Advocate (changed to Keisar Betancourt and back!) 5 Sep 2013 from 18 Aug 2007
https://www.techdirt.com/comments.php?start=60&u=advocate
dickeyrat: 3 comments TOTAL in SEVEN years! Aug 17th, 2017, Jun 23rd, 2011, and Jul 10th, 2010!!!
https://www.techdirt.com/user/dickeyrat
https://www.techdirt.com/user/andrewlduane On May 1st, 2017
https://www.techdirt.com/user/slowgreenturtle Dec 15th, 2016
Real zombies! Now, THAT'S a unique feature of Techdirt! You should talk up reader loyalty! -- I hope that a larger site gets interested in "accounts" here...
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Re: Re: "Surprisingly, Bangladesh comes in second for duration on the site, and that's with a decent amount of traffic (over 10,000 visitors)."
Congratulations: You chose literally the smallest, most worthless hill possible to die on!
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Re: Re: Re: "Surprisingly, Bangladesh comes in second for duration on the site, and that's with a decent amount of traffic (over 10,000 visitors)."
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Re: "Surprisingly, Bangladesh comes in second for duration on the site, and that's with a decent amount of traffic (over 10,000 visitors)."
You mean English?
Since Bangladesh was part of the British Empire for ~200 years, wouldn't you think it likely that at least a few % of the population can speak, read and write English? As a country of 150 million people, even if only 1% could read English, that's still 1.5 million people.
However, after checking out wikipedia (something you could have done - but then, those who are wilfully ignorant don't tend to do any sort of research, do they?) , it is actually quite a sizeable % who can read/write English:
I would suggest that there are many millions of Bangladeshi's who have a better understanding of English than you seem to have.
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Back to "Comment Held for Moderation" lie, too. -- How many times have I seen that?
Oh, and "Resend" still usually works, a block at first try is what prompted this comment.
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Re: Back to "Comment Held for Moderation" lie, too. -- How many times have I seen that?
That was a rhetorical question.
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Re: Back to "Comment Held for Moderation" lie, too. -- How many times have I seen that?
But I suppose you can't blame him for being hissy. He'll have to troll twice as hard until MyNameHere gets his replacement nickname online!
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A few other 'missing' stats that might be fun to see (or not):
*commenters that draw the most replies/rebuttals
*commenters with the most hidden comments
*commenters with the most replies from Techdirt staff
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Because every so often someone does a little crack & thinks they will be the one to finally say the right words to make them stop being asshats.
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I've had indications that I need to get a life, but they're rarely so definitively quantified.
The secret is to start with "Try to say something nice about Comcast."
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Gibraltar is a country?
I always thought it is a British Overseas Territory, located at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula.
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