Techdirt 2011: The Numbers.

from the not-the-end-of-the-world-yet dept

Happy New Year everyone! Last year's "The Numbers" post proved to be quite popular, so we decided to do it again. 2011 was yet another banner year for Techdirt.

We handled around 14.7 million visits last year (up from 2009's 11M). Those visitors checked out the 3,923 stories that we posted and submitted 205,129 comments. Oddly, the #1 story for 2011 was one that was actually written in 2010, about the ubiquitous "Free Public WiFi" mystery. It turns out that a lot of people remain curious about all those "free public WiFi" ad hoc networks you see. Two stories about SOPA/PIPA graced the top ten, as well as the harrowing censorship tale of dajaz1.com. It appears that you folks are concerned about government censorship.

2011 was also a great year for the comment voting system. Congrats to Marcus Carab and Dark Helmet, who garnered the highest cumulative scores for insightful and funniest comments, respectively -- and, amazingly, each came in second place to the other in the category they didn't come in first. I sense a growing rivalry...

The top browser used by Techdirt readers was still Firefox (35%). Chrome, which lost by a narrow margin to IE last year, blew past IE's 15% to 30%. And there are still nearly 100,000 that are, despite all of the best efforts of Microsoft to convince you otherwise, still inexplicably using IE6.

Mobile usage jumped up to 1.6M visits this year, which is nearly a 200% increase from 2010. 615k of those visits came from iPhones, versus 566k for Android and 322k from iPad. In aggregate, Apple devices did beat Android. iPhone beat out Android last year by nearly 2:1, so clearly that gap is quickly closing.

Where did this year's traffic come from? Reddit jumped in the charts this year, referring 2.1M visits, up 277% from last year's 557k. I'm a little saddened to see that Slashdot is definitely not what it used to be -- referrals from them dropped by nearly a third last year. I suppose getting Slashdotted is no longer what it used to be. Continuing to perform quite well, however, are both StumbleUpon and HackerNews. Facebook also sent a decent amount of traffic.

To hear some of Google's enemies (including politicians in Congress) tell the story, the only way sites get traffic is via search engines -- and Google specifically. They act as though, if Google isn't sending you tons of traffic, you don't exist. Google definitely does send us a fair bit of traffic, but only about 20% of our actual traffic came from searches. We certainly value that 20%, but it definitely shows that you don't have to rely on search traffic to get traffic. Even more telling, here are the top three search terms that brought people to Techdirt in 2011:

1. techdirt
2. sopa
3. tech dirt

Where are you all coming from? It's really not that different than in 2010. The vast majority of you are from the US. Canada is second, followed closely by the UK. After that, there's a pretty sharp drop off to Australia, then Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. France, India and New Zealand round out the top 10. Last year, we noted that Japan narrowly beat out China to follow India as the leading Asian countries. This year (despite stories of how we're sometimes blocked in China), China jumped into second place in Asia, followed by South Korea, who leap-frogged Japan. Brazil was tops in South America and South Africa was tops in Africa -- same as in 2010.

All in all, people from 230 countries or territories visited Techdirt. Just like last year, there was a single visit from Christmas Island -- though, last year, we had someone in our comments suggest that the single Christmas Island visit may have been him, and not really from Christmas Island.

Last year, we noted that the only countries that we appeared to get absolutely no visits from were... North Korea, Western Sahara & Chad. Western Sahara and Chad, once again, failed to send any visitors... but, in a stunning development, we got two visitors from North Korea. And, in case you were wondering, Belarus, whose new laws will make it difficult for people there to access many websites, actually sent over 1,000 visitors last year. Also, I have no idea why, but the nearly 1,000 visitors from Gibraltar spent the highest average time on the site of visitors from any other country/territory -- averaging nearly 20 minutes per visit. People from Macedonia actually visited the most pages (on average) per visit -- at just under 6 on average from over 3,500 visitors.

And, of course, this isn't just about the odd facts, but about the overall community -- with many of you being quite loyal, which we appreciate to no end. 1.5 million of the visits -- or just over 10% came from people who visited Techdirt more than 100 times last year -- and the vast majority of those (just under 1 million) actually visited the site more than 200 times. You people rock.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone for making yet another year of Techdirt awesome. Here's to a fantastic 2012.

Top Ten Stories, by Unique Pageviews, on Techdirt for 2011:

1. The History Of The (Fake) 'Free Public WiFi' You Always See At Airports
2. SOPA Markup Runs Out Of Time; Likely Delayed Until 2012 [Update: Or Not...]
3. Apple Continues To Insist Only It Can Use An Apple In A Logo; Threatens Small German Cafe
4. Guy Who Created The TSA Says It's Failed, And It's Time To Dismantle It
5. Craigslist Trying To Destroy The Life Of Someone Who Made Posting To Craigslist Easier
6. Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details...
7. Company Thanks Guy Who Alerted Them To Big Security Flaw By Sending The Cops... And The Bill
8. NY Times & LA Times Both Come Out Against SOPA & PIPA
9. EU Officially Seizes The Public Domain, Retroactively Extends Copyright
10. PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America

2011's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume

1. If You're Arguing That Someone 'Deserves' Copyright, Your Argument Is Wrong (823 comments)
2. Do A Little Dance, Make A Little Love...Get Bodyslammed Tonight (At The Jefferson Memorial) (457 comments)
3. Judge Bans Handing (Factual) Pamphlets To Jurors; Raising First Amendment Issues (429 comments)
4. TSA Agent Threatens Woman With Defamation, Demands $500k For Calling Intrusive Search 'Rape' (403 comments)
5. Revisiting The Question Of Who Deserves Copyright (376 comments)
6. PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America (376 comments)
7. Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos (374 comments)
8. Monkeys Don't Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos (372 comments)
9. Why Is The Justice Department Pretending US Copyright Laws Apply In The UK? (351 comments)
10. Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details... (341 comments)

* Note that only 2 of the most commented stories were also among the top 10 most visited stories, once again showing that traffic and the number of comments don't necessarily correlate.

2011's Top Users, by comment volume

1. The eejit - 3,963 comments
2. Jay - 3,433 comments
3. Marcus Carab - 2,255 comments
4. Richard - 2,209 comments
5. PaulT - 1,841 comments
6. Hephaestus - 1,662 comments
7. nasch - 1,456 comments
8. Dark Helmet - 1,426 comments
9. abc gum - 1,357 comments
10. HothMonster - 1,313 comments

2011's Most Insightful Users, as voted by the community

1. Marcus Carab
2. Dark Helmet
3. Karl
4. Richard
5. Jay
6. Chris Rhodes
7. The eejit
8. PaulT
9. That Anonymous Coward
10. E. Zachary Knight

2011's Funniest Users, as voted by the community

1. Dark Helmet
2. Marcus Carab
3. Capitalist Lion Tamer
4. The eejit
5. :Lobo Santo
6. Chris Rhodes
7. Gwiz
8. Hephaestus
9. ChurchHatesTucker
10. That Anonymous Coward

Filed Under: community, numbers, stats, techdirt, traffic

Data Shows: Removing 'Rogue Sites' From Search Won't Make Much Of A Difference

from the stop-blaming-google dept

The legacy entertainment industry absolutely loves to blame Google for its problems. As I've noted in the past, it's mostly a correlation-not-causation error. That is, they see their own difficulty in adapting and sinking revenues (mainly at the record labels) and they see Google making a ton of money -- and they conclude that the two things are related, and that Google must be to blame. That's why they keep demanding that Google "take action" against the so-called "rogue sites." It seemed like a reasonable question, then, to see just how much traffic Google actually sends to these sites. Thankfully Compete tracks a lot of this kind of data... and the MPAA recently handed us a list of "rogue sites" to look at.

Pulling up the data on traffic sources for every site listed there shows that taking the big search engines out of the equation would barely matter. Across all 19 sites listed, 85% DOES NOT come from search (Google, Yahoo and Bing). Specifically, across all of those sites, the big three search engines deliver a whopping 15.2% of the traffic to those sites. Google sends about 11.5% of the traffic. Remove search links... and those sites will see a slight dip -- at best.

Of course, not all of these sites are equal, so we decided to look more closely at the favorite bogeyman of the legacy entertainment industry: The Pirate Bay. To hear the industry tell the story, if Google just blocked The Pirate Bay from its results, traffic would dry up. The evidence there suggests that the entertainment industry doesn't have the facts on their side (do they ever?). Google search drives slightly less than 22% of The Pirate Bay's traffic. Considering how many sites rely on Google for traffic, this is well below average. Add in Yahoo Search and Bing, and we're still talking about less than 28% of TPB's traffic actually coming from search.

And of that search traffic, what are people searching for? Well, most are searching for some variation on "the pirate bay." We looked at all of the search traffic to TPB for the past three months. The top 16 search terms that send traffic to TPB are some variation on the site's name. These are the top eight search terms, for example:

1. pirate bay
2. the pirate bay
3. piratebay
4. thepiratebay
5. tpb
6. piratebay.org
7. pirates bay
8. thepiratebay.org

In other words, people getting to TPB from Google already know exactly what they're looking for. It's actually pretty rare for people to just randomly search on an artist's name, and have Google send them off to The Pirate Bay. In fact, going through the top 100 search terms that take people to The Pirate Bay, less than 30% appear to be direct searches for infringing material -- and only two of those don't involve the material in question and a word that shows the person is clearly looking for infringing material (mostly "torrent", but sometimes "serial number" or something like that). Meaning that only 2 of the top 100 searches that drive people to The Pirate Bay actually involve people just searching for content without making it clear that they're looking for either TPB or a torrent file specifically. Those two searches? "Drake take care download" and "r kelly sex tape."

Take Care, of course, is Drake's high profile new album -- the same one that Drake made clear he didn't mind if people listened to the leaked versions online -- effectively sanctioning people to search for the downloads. It's also been a highly successful album on the sales front, anyway -- selling over 600,000 copies in its debut week. Doesn't sound like Drake is really suffering because of this search. As for the R. Kelly tape... well... let's just not go there.

Still, the point is pretty clear: Google and the other search engines don't really drive that much traffic to TPB (or other so-called "rogue sites"), and an awful lot of the traffic they do drive... is people searching for TPB itself (meaning they're just using Google as a shortcut, rather than to "discover" infringing works). And, when Google does drive people to specific content, it's usually because the person is already looking for what's almost certain to be an unauthorized version. Thus, the picture the industry paints of people doing innocent searches for authorized content, and somehow being waylaid by Google pointing them to TPB just isn't seen in the data. At all.

Force Google, Yahoo and Bing to "block" links to TPB and it will have almost no impact on traffic to TPB. It may annoy some people who use Google for navigation (rather than discovery), but it won't stop them from going to TPB, since that's clearly what they want. The drive to force Google to either block or "warn" people about these links seems entirely pointless based on the data. So, once again, the data suggests that the industry is in hysterics based on reasons not supported by the data. The effort to make search engines block links would be a total and complete waste of time.

Filed Under: hype, rogue sites, search, traffic
Companies: google, microsoft, the pirate bay, yahoo

Police Ticket Guy Who Helped Direct Traffic After Traffic Light Failure; Then Leave Without Handling Traffic

from the no-good-deed dept

Sometimes it seems that law enforcement is a lot more interested in enforcing the letter of the law than the spirit of the law. Via Radley Balko, we learn that police in Pasadena California showed up at the intersection of Fair Oaks and Huntington Avenues to issue a ticket to Alan Ehrlich. Ehrlich's crime? Directing traffic.

Apparently the traffic light went out, leading to backups of more than a mile. It was taking cars more than 30 minutes to get through. Ehrlich decided to help out -- grabbing an orange shirt and some safety flags that he had, and helped direct traffic, apparently clearing up much of the backup in about 10 minutes. It was about that time that the police showed up and issued him a citation. And... at no point did the police decide that maybe they should be directing traffic.

Amazingly, the police chief is defending all of this by saying that the force does "not have the man power" to staff someone there to direct traffic -- but they apparently have the staff to issue a citation to the guy who volunteered to help out.

Filed Under: police, tickets, traffic

How Many Websites Have Totally Bogus Traffic Numbers Due To Facebook Bug?

from the just-wondering... dept

For a while now, we've heard of websites claiming that they now get a ridiculous amount of referral traffic from Facebook. We've certainly noticed that we get a decent amount of traffic from Facebook, but it's rarely in the top five sites for referrals. For a while, I've just wondered if people just don't like to pass around our stuff on Facebook (as opposed to Twitter, which does drive lots of traffic -- or if, perhaps, we didn't do enough to encourage people to follow our Facebook page). However, something odd happened a couple weeks ago. All of a sudden, we noticed a ton of traffic coming from Facebook. Before noon, we'd already passed a normal day's worth of traffic, and by the afternoon, we were on track to more than triple a standard day's page views. But, then we noticed a few oddities. First, a lot of the traffic was going to relatively old stories. Second, doing a search on Facebook didn't turn up anyone linking to those stories. Third, and most importantly, looking at the number of unique visitors, as opposed to pageviews, showed that those were more or less in line with a standard day's traffic. Clearly something was off.

I started chatting with a few folks about it, and Marcus Carab pointed us to information on a Facebook bug that's been around for about a year, in which Facebook's "like" button adds a string (fb_xd_fragment, for those who are curious) to the URL that leads to a blank page... often causing multiple pageviews. There are workarounds, though it's stunning that Facebook -- which is pushing use of the "like" button all over the place -- has not implemented its own fix. By that evening we'd installed a workaround, redirecting the bogus links to legitimate links, and stopping some of the false reloads. Yet, over the next few days, we noticed that even when we fixed that "known" problem, we were still seeing a hell of a lot more traffic from Facebook than made sense or that we had seen before.

Eventually, we used the referrer URL (www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?....) to track it down to a problem with the way Facebook's "like" button behaves when our pages are accessed with IE7 (and possibly IE6). Something in the button basically goes into a loop and just keeps requesting the page that it is on -- essentially, repeatedly "reloading." This makes page views shoot up like crazy. Because of this, if you visit our page with IE, we no longer show you a "like" button. Since doing so, our pageview numbers have returned to expected levels. (For our IE users, now that we've confirmed that the problem was the like button on IE, we plan to try an alternative implementation of the like button to see if that avoids the problem.)

Apparently, we're not alone. Other sites also just noticed that they were dealing with similar issues and put in place similar workarounds.

But here's the question: how many people don't realize that these Facebook bugs exist, and are happily lapping up the not-really-there pageviews and reporting them as legit? I would guess that many people who are recipients of such a traffic deluge honestly don't realize that it's a bug and that the traffic is phantom traffic. But it wouldn't surprise me if a few sites are simply happy for any way to "juice" their numbers. Over the years there have been a few big cases of newspaper circulation scandals. It kind of makes you wonder when we'll start to see something similar with websites that report fake numbers concerning their traffic?

Of course, for us, being honest probably costs us money. Since many ad campaigns work on a page view (CPM) basis, if we can report triple our existing page views, that certainly would boost our ad revenue. But it's also incredibly dishonest, and, for those who know this is happening, potentially fraud. It seems like only a matter of time until we hear about sites purposely leveraging such things for their own advantage.

Filed Under: bug, like, traffic, web traffic
Companies: facebook

Even With A Very Leaky Paywall, Noticeable Decline In NY Times Traffic

from the ad-revenues-will-grow... dept

With the NY Times offering up its pretend paywall, part of the supposed idea was that the site was trying to figure out a way to retain its traffic and get people to pay -- a difficult balancing act for sure. So the way it did so was to set up a paywall that didn't really exist, hoping that some people would just pay anyway, but that traffic wouldn't decline. So far, it appears they're a bit off on that latter assumption. Some initial reports show that, in the immediate aftermath of the "not really a wall" going up, page views declined between 11 and 30% per day. That's an awful lot of potential ad revenue lost on a site that gets a lot of traffic. Perhaps it's made up by finding people who were willing to pay for the paywall, but if you had to guess which strategy is going to provide more growth going forward, would it be new paywall subscribers, or more ad revenue?

Filed Under: paywall, traffic
Companies: ny times

Anyone Notice That Sites Don't Have To Rely On Google So Much For Traffic Any More?

from the the-value-of-earned-links dept

One of the driving forces behind some of the legal attacks on Google is that Google is the defacto monopoly on being found online. We've heard over and over again a claim along the lines of "if you're not in Google, you're not online." And there may be some truth in that statement for many websites, but the rise of the social web appears to certainly be decreasing the reliance on Google for "being found." Nearly two years ago, we wrote about the increasing value of "earned" or "passed" links or media. That is, with social communications platforms like Facebook and Twitter, people are promoting various websites themselves and others are discovering them not because of Google, but because their friends, families and colleagues are recommending them.

I have to admit that I was still a little skeptical of how big this would really be, but in the last year (and especially the last six months), I've really changed my mind -- and that's because we're seeing evidence of it directly. For years, our largest referrer every single day was Google. It wasn't even close. Every day, people came from Google (sometimes via searches, sometimes via things like Google Reader or iGoogle), and it simply dominated how people found us. Yet, these days, it's quite rare to see Google as the top referrer to Techdirt on any given day. Instead, it seems that every day we get an onslaught of traffic from at least one (and sometimes more) social communications platforms: StumbleUpon, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook now regularly come in as our biggest referrers. Google still drives a lot of traffic, but our traffic has certainly become a lot more diversified.

And while those companies certainly are not "competitors" to Google in the traditional sense, when it comes to the question of "the only way to be found online is Google," I can say empirically that's simply not true for us.

Along those lines, however, I should note that the reason those social communications systems work is because of people who like what we have to say and want to share it. That doesn't work if your content sucks, so if your content sucks, you may still have to rely on Google (but, even then, part of what Google tries to do is make sure the sucky content gets dropped down as well -- so the best solution might be to not have sucky content).

Related to all this, as we head into a brief holiday break (we'll be back next week, don't worry), I wanted to thank everyone who makes this community so fun and dynamic -- and certainly the folks who made this story possible by regularly sharing our stories on those other platforms. That's mighty kind of you, and it is greatly appreciated.

Finally, again, related to all of this, we never seem to post about the different ways to follow us online, even though most of you have probably figured it out on your own already. Of course, we have an RSS feed, a Twitter feed and a Facebook page (which often fails to update for reasons not at all clear to us). We also have an email list that sends out copies of each of the previous day's posts early in the morning (US time) the following day. You can sign up for that by putting your email address in the box in the upper righthand corner of this page. Feel free to follow us (or not) however you prefer, and thanks for being a part of the community.

Filed Under: earned links, linking, passed links, referrals, sharing, social communities, traffic
Companies: facebook, google, reddit, stumbleupon, twitter

When China Redirected 15% Of Internet Traffic... Was It On Purpose Or An Error?

from the encryption... dept

TheNextWeb points us to a story claiming that China apparently "hijacked" about 15% of all internet traffic for a period of about 18 minutes back in April. The source of the story is McAfee, who certainly has some incentives to play up such "threats," so perhaps take it with a grain of salt.

Also, it should be noted that this isn't new. Some folks appeared to spot this soon after it happened as it wasn't even remotely covert -- and also said that it appeared to be a "fat fingers" type of mistake based on the way it took place. Yet, to read the McAfee report, the assumption is that it must have been for nefarious reasons. Perhaps, but that wasn't what it appeared to be initially.

Of course, McAfee is pointing out that some of the traffic included US government and military traffic, but the US government said it was no big deal because its traffic was encrypted. However, McAfee is claiming that the US government is still at risk, and that it should be concerned. The explanation at "National Defense Magazine" based on what McAfee said seems slightly misleading:

"If China telecom intercepts that [encrypted message] and they are sitting on the middle of that, they can send you their public key with their public certificate and you will not know any better," he said. The holder of this certificate has the capability to decrypt encrypted communication links, whether it's web traffic, emails or instant messaging, Alperovitch said. "It is a flaw in the way the Internet operates," said Yoris Evers, director of worldwide public relations at McAfee.

It would be great if a security expert could chime in here, but this seems like a rather simplified version of how a man-in-the-middle attack on public key encryption would work. It's possible that it could work in some specific instances, but this report makes it out like China could automatically read any encrypted message.

Filed Under: china, encryption, internet, traffic

T-Mobile, Leap Move Take A Different Tack On Mobile Broadband

from the all-you-can-eat-no-more dept

Lots of broadband operators around the world have been talking about how their networks can't keep up with traffic demands, so they'll have to shift back to usage-based pricing. In particular, US mobile operators AT&T and Verizon have led the rhetoric, even as they continue to launch the unlimited plans they say are such a problem. The head of one broadband provider in the UK recently said a switch to usage-based pricing, and away from flat-rate plans, was inevitable as soon as one operator in a market made the switch. He dismissed the idea that operators would seek to differentiate by sticking with flat-rate plans, or by taking any other pricing strategy than usage-based plans, ignoring the fact that consumers have grown accustomed to flat-rate offerings, and that the lack of clarity in usage, billing and pricing that per-unit plans are a big turnoff for them. Already, we're seeing some signs that the operator landscape may not be dominated by such groupthink, as T-Mobile and Leap Wireless have made changes to their mobile broadband plans that are out of step with many other operators. The two companies have changed the way the caps on some of their plans work: for instance, on T-Mobile, when a user reaches their 5GB monthly cap, they don't get hit with overage fees, the speed of their connection gets throttled, avoiding the uncertainty inherent in usage-based pricing. Perhaps it's not a perfect situation, but it does show that some operators aren't afraid to step out from the party line and explore different pricing models. It also builds some hope that when some providers do decide to regress to usage-based schemes, there will be some choices for consumers.

Filed Under: broadband, mobile broadband, traffic
Companies: leap, t-mobile

Rupert Murdoch Gets Shy: Tries To Hide Traffic To His Pre-Paywalled Sites

from the don't-want-any-comparisons... dept

It looks like even Rupert Murdoch and his crew at News Corp. aren't all that confident in how well his new paywalls for his newspapers in the UK are going to do. Apparently, News Corp. has convinced the media-owned organization, ABC, that tracks traffic to newspaper sites in the UK, to no longer publish the numbers for his sites. ABC is still tracking the numbers, but it won't publish them. Apparently, someone is a bit sensitive about people noticing how much traffic has shrunk. Maybe it's starting to sink in that there really is competition online, and most of it is remaining free.

Filed Under: paywall, rupert murdoch, traffic
Companies: news corp.

Italian Pirate Bay Block Leads To Massive Traffic Boost For Competing Torrent Sites

from the whac-a-mole dept

A decade into the entertainment industry's massive game of whac-a-mole when it comes to file sharing sites, you would think that people would realize that blocking or banning any particular site doesn't do a damn thing to slow the pace of file sharing around the globe. Instead, it does two things: (1) informs more people of the social norm of unauthorized file trading and (2) causes people to scatter to more sites, usually further underground and even more difficult to identify and stop. And, indeed, that appears to be the case in Italy. You may recall that the Italian Supreme Court recently decided that it was okay for a lower court to block The Pirate Bay (the lower court is now deciding what to do), but in response, it appears that users have already figured out how to scatter to other sites, as many other torrent sites have seen an influx of Italian users. Another mole whacked, and yet, more keep popping up. It's difficult to see how this is a particularly good strategic policy.

Filed Under: bittorrent, italy, pirate bay, traffic
Companies: the pirate bay