Review Statistics
Here are the frankly astonishing review statistics for January 2010:
All Literary Comments: 6366
This takes into account all literary comments, including comments the author made to their own work. I wasn't sure if we'd cross the 6,000 post finish line, but not only did we, but we also greatly surpassed it. The next highest? April 2008 with 5394. That's right; we beat the next highest month by nearly 1000 comments. Yet, this counts everything, right? Surely it must get worse...
Literary Comments minus Author Comments: 5416
This number subtracts the comments made by authors. The next highest is January 2009 with 4464 such comments. That's right; even after we subtract comments made by the author, we still beat the next highest month by nearly 1000 comments. Yet, this counts even "This iz great!" reviews, right? Surely it must get worse...
Reviews: 4802
This excludes comments made by the author and comments less than 250 characters in length. The next highest? January 2009 again with 3805 reviews. This is the widest margin yet of any of the statistics. Yet, because of that character counter, I bet a lot of people made just the bare minimum to get their comment counted as a review. It surely must get worse now...
Reviews+: 3433
This excludes comments made by the authors and comments less than 500 characters in length. The next highest is December 2008 with 3035 such reviews.
So no matter how you look at it, this is the biggest reviewing month ever. In fact, it gets even better when you look at percentages. Some key ones:
- 89% of literary comments (minus author comments) were long enough to count as reviews. This is pretty much as high as it can possibly be. No other month beats this.
- The ratio of reviews to works was 4.28 to 1. The only month to beat this is October 2009 when we had the mandated review ratio(4.84 to 1).
- The ratio of reviews+ to works was 3.06 to 1. The only month to beat this is October 2009 again (3.34 to 1).
Now obviously, length is not necessarily a good indicator of quality. But that's only if you have some other objective indicators of quality to go by. We don't have any such other indicators, and so we're left with length. On that score, January 2010 has by far the best quality reviews thus far. The worst year, by the way, was 2005 when YWS was first starting out. In that year, several months had fewer than 50% of literary comments count as reviews.
Of course, one person that did more than anyone else to drive reviews so high this month was Snoink and her "evil minions". Although their activity waned as a group toward the end of the month, they racked up impressive numbers in the first two weeks, enabling January 2010 to become the biggest reviewing month in YWS history.
Going into February, I'm expecting some of the numbers to come down. First, because it's a shorter month by three days. But secondly because some people just need a breather. Yet, lets all try to keep improving our reviewing skills and make a least a few reviews per week. In fact, if everyone who logged into YWS every week made just one review, then we'd have 4000 reviews by the end of the month easily.
Overall Site Statistics
January 2010 was a big month in other ways too. A few key numbers I always look at are the number of visits, the number of pageviews, and the average time spent on the site. I also look at the number of posts made on YWS, but that number is becoming less and less able to capture the full activity on YWS. For one, the number of posts does not capture any comments made in the Blogs (which are the busiest area of the site). For another, the number of posts does not take into account activity in the chatroom. So when looking at posts, the only number I really pay attention there is the number of reviews. As you can tell, January 2010 was very big from that perspective.
Enough with the chit-chat though. Lets see the numbers:
- Visits: 46,757
- Pageviews: 708,464
- Avg. Time Spent on YWS: 15 minutes, 27 seconds
- All Posts Including Topics: 16,213
- All Posts Excluding Topics: 14,598
The visits number is the third highest overall for YWS. March 2009 is the next highest for 47,057 visits (barely higher), and January 2009 is the highest overall with 49,134 visits.
The pageviews number, though, is the highest ever for YWS. The next highest is January 2009 with 691,320 pageviews.
The average time spent on YWS is... well, average. Some months, it can get as high as 17+ minutes. Other months, it can get as low as only 12 minutes. It does beat most months though, so it's really slightly above average.
The posts number is high, and ranks January 2010 as #9 overall (out of 62 total months of operation).
A note though. One reason why January 2010 was able to rack up such high visits and pageviews numbers is because of that mass PM I sent regarding critique sandwiches. Normally when I send out mass PMs, I remember not to allow an e-mail to go out with it. I did not remember to do that this time, and as a result, a lot of people who haven't visited YWS in months (years in some cases) logged on.
The good news in that is that it appears a large number of those people have stuck around. The daily visits number has stayed really high for the past week, as has the number of pageviews.
If you're interested, I've included a link to an image of the page showing all the January statistics:
Click here for all the January 2010 statistics
