So, September 2013 was a rather unusual month statistically. You may have caught me saying this a couple times, but in a lot of ways, activity was down. Yet on the other hand, review activity was up by a lot. Plus, YWS had its largest increase in unique visitors ever.
How to explain all that? It might have to do with school starting and people having less time for YWS, but making more of the time with which they have. Or, it could just be statistical noise. Either way, all that really matters is that there was strong review activity!
Anyhoot...
(Number in parentheses is percentage increase/decrease from August 2 - August 31)
Overall Statistics
Pageviews: 565,126 (-9.5%)
Visits: 49,347 (-3%)
Unique Visitors: 13,010 (+16.8%)
Avg Visit Duration: 15 min 39 sec (-5.3%)
YWS Specific Stats
Reviews: 2,885 (+9.4%)
Literary Works: 651 (+5.4%)
New Members: 277
Storybooks: 928
Forum posts: 1608
Top 10 Countries
1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Australia
4. Canada
5. India
6. New Zealand
7. Ireland
8. Puerto Rico
9. United Arab Emirates
10. Saudi Arabia
Top 10 Cities
1. London
2. Sydney
3. Brisbane
4. Auckland
5. New York
6. Atlanta
7. Chicago
8. Indianapolis
9. Milwaukee
10. Toronto
Browser Wars
1. Chrome - 44.9%
2. Safari - 20.95%
3. Firefox - 14.36%
4. Internet Explorer - 10.95%
5. Android Browser - 5.36%
Analysis!
Kinda weird, right? Unique visitors increased by nearly 17% while visits overall went down. Normally, the two go up or down by about the same amount, which makes sense. When that doesn't happen, it usually means a topic on YWS went viral, drawing in a lot of unique visitors for that one topic (usually through StumbleUpon). Yet in this case, the unique visitors number was actually fairly steady throughout the entire month. That's great because it suggests higher activity, but it only adds to the mystery! How could unique visitors go up by nearly 17% but visits decrease by 3%? Odd.
In any case, September is now YWS' second highest reviewing month this year after June, which had 2,980 reviews. Between the two, though, I'd say September was stronger. In June, we had one of our best Review Days ever, but without that Review Day, the number of reviews would've been below 2,000.
On the other hand, September would've passed the 2,000 review mark with or without a Review Day. So if for October I could somehow choose a September level of activity or a June level of activity, I'd definitely pick the former.
Go YWS!