Note: Updated with review stats. See: post721991.html#p721991
May 2010 is now over for everyone in the world so it's time for the YWS statistical report!
Usually, YWS sees a bump in activity for May, and this May was no exception. The post count at 16540 was the highest it's been since March 2009, and certainly the highest so far this year. Pageviews also set another record of ~744,000 (a 1% increase from the previous record holder of April 2010). Yet, it's likely it's actually higher than that, which I explain at the very end.
If you wish, you can read a couple of introductory items I added on gauging user activity and growth since last May, or just skip to the statistics at the bottom.
The Problem of Gauging User Activity
Now, gauging user activity is very tricky. As I've learned especially over the past year, the post count is a poor indicator of user activity. For one, you have blogs that don't figure into the post count. You also have the chatroom, which was rarely open prior to April 2009.
Yet, if I look at the visits count, it's woefully below the highs. For May 2010, the unique visitor count was 10,873 meaning that 10,873 different people visited YWS. The high was set in January 2009 at 16,335. That would mean that 33.4% fewer people visited YWS in May 2010 compared to January 2009.
That's true, but then you look at the number of visits. In May 2010, there were 45,061 visits to YWS meaning those 10,873 people visited YWS a total of 45,061 times. So the average visitor returned to YWS 4 times. But in January 2009, the visits number was just a little bit higher at 49,134. So how can the number of unique visitors be down 33.4%, but the number of visits be down only 8.2%?
One word: Google.
When we made the switchover from the old YWS to the new YWS, Google didn't fully adapt and it still hasn't fully adapted. In fact, it'll probably be another several months before Google finally gets used to the new site. Until then, YWS won't show up as often in random searches which means fewer unique visitors.
Yet, most of those unique visitors never really came to YWS for YWS. A lot of those 16,000 in January were searching for something else (YWS comes up in a lot of random queries), and spent less than a minute on the site never to come back again.
So instead, the best way to gauge user activity is to look at direct traffic to YWS. Those are people that either have YWS bookmarked or type it into the url bar. In May 2010, that number was 19,004. In January 2009? Only 13,316. So using direct traffic as a gauge of user activity shows that user activity has increased by 42% since January 2009 (and January 2009 was the high-point of 2009!).
Growth Since May 2009
The only thing to fall from May 2009 to May 2010 was the number of unique visitors, which is a result of YWS not showing up in as many Google searches as before (discussed above).
Otherwise, there has been growth in every metric. In terms of pageviews, YWS increased by 63%. In terms of visits, YWS increased negligibly by .31%, but in terms of visits from direct traffic, YWS increased by 60%. In terms of posts, YWS increased by 56%.
So all in all, I think we can say that YWS has increased by about 60% since this time last year. That's above average growth for the site and definitely none too shabby.
Statistics
Without further ado...
Visits: 45,061
Pageviews: 744,378
Posts: 16,540
Avg. Time on Site: 16 minutes, 28 seconds
Top 10 Countries
1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. New Zealand
6. Philippines
7. India
8. Ireland
9. Czech Republic
10. South Africa
Top 10 Cities
1. London
2. Sydney
3. Cebu, Philippines
4. Brisbane, Australia
5. Saskatoon, Canada
6. Auckland, New Zealand
7. New York City
8. Vancouver, Canada
9. Melbourne, Australia
10. Edinburgh, UK
The USA continues to only have one dog in the top 10 cities, while the Oceania region captures five of the top 10 (yes, I know the Philippines isn't technically part of Oceania but it's right next door).
Browser Share
IE: 36.95%
Firefox: 30.62%
Safari: 15.08%
Chrome: 14.63%
Opera: 1.14%
All browsers managed to increase their share on YWS this month except for IE, which fell by about 1.5%. The browser with the largest increase (both absolute and relative) was Chrome with a .6% increase.
About the stats
There was a 12 hour period where no stats were being collected due to an error on my part. Fortunately, this was during the 12 hour quiet period and so I think the pageviews number is off by only 7,000 to 10,000.
I don't know anybody on the site that's that far West.
And please ignore the shameful typo.