Dave
Staff member
I like to do these occasionally to let everyone know what's going on with the site with traffic, users and other behind-the-scenes stuff.
First, let's talk about stuff that is upcoming. Really there are only a couple things that I can see on the immediate horizon now that we have a couple dark themes people seem to like. The first is that the arcade is going to be going through a lot of changes and a huge facelift. Right now it's very basic because I'm only testing base functionality. If I added a lot of games to it then if they had to reset again it would be a pain. So I'm taking that slowly. But it's coming along nicely.
The second thing is Zappit's Comic Collective efforts, which I really appreciate. He's looking into getting someone to revamp our front page (which sucks!) and that'll help everyone out.
Other things that are currently happening are things like FigmentPez getting his very own sub board. Dude has single-handedly brought in more new users and traffic than any of the rest of us combined - and that includes me. So I gave him his own little place where he can play around all he wants.
You all also know about the styles changes that I made just today. Added some dark themes and got rid of a few that were either too broken to keep or were unused. I'll be adding one more and that's it. I think we're done tweaking the styles. Any more and it gets difficult to load anything on the system.
Now to the fun part for me - NUMBERS! We moved to XenForo in January of 2011 and I think it's been a good move for us. I initially liked vBulletin but it was very old, very bloated and the company that runs it pissed me off with their business practices. Now they are trying to depose customers who went from vB to Xenforo. So I may be getting a call or something. Hope so. XenForo didn't steal me away from them, I was pushed away by their terrible software and company.
Anyway, when we moved away there was an initial dropoff in traffic, but this is mostly due to all our links being simplified through the vB SEO, which did not transfer well to XF. So we lost our link placement in the major search engines and the spiders were unable to backtrace us for a time. This is evident in the early days when the visitors are way down.
Note that these numbers are based on January 5 - November 30 for both 2010 & 2011. Orange line is 2011, blue line is 2010.
First, let's look at overall traffic. (Note that I have 2 images per section - the number with trend line and the full graph. Trend line is full sized picture while the graph can be expanded to a larger picture.)
As you can see, we are down about 25,000 visits over this period. Not worried at all, though. Look at the trend line. For vB it was very steady. For XF it's a steady climb in the positive direction. In fact, the graph shows that starting about April, XF was at or exceeding visits over vB so when I do this again next year it'll be a net gain if we continue at our current pace.
But that's for ALL visits. Let's take a gander at unique visits, which is a better indicator of new blood being infused. Looks great to me! We are above last year by quite a ways and the trend line is again upward in direction! So we are growing and bringing in new people.
This one is a little more worrisome, but I don't know what exactly happened so I'm not putting much stock in it.
Pageviews are astronomically higher in vB than they are in XF. But again the trend for vB was downward and the trend for XF is upward. Should I be worried? I don't think so. Look at the main graph around June or so of last year. What the hell happened?!? Pageviews shot through the roof all sudden-like. Like from an average of about 20K/day to almost 40K/day. The Kanye thing happened in 2009 so that wasn't it. It may well remain a mystery.
This is another on that doesn't bother me that much. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who enter at a certain point and then leave the site altogether. A high bounce rate is bad. In this case we are up a truckload over the past year, but if you see the trend line, about June of last year (again with the June!!) something happened that took the vB bounce rate down from the 40% range to like 4%. Again, not sure what I did or what happened.
The next stat is how long people spent on our site. Again we are below last year but I'm not overly concerned. We are currently static or rising while vB was on a downward trend. And vB had an arcade. Once ours gets cracking it'll help this a lot.
Last, we're going to look at New vs. Returning visitors. We show a rise in both vB and XF but we have a larger number of New Visits with XF than did with vB, which is good.
So there you have it. We're doing very well under XF and we're still gaining new users and growing. Just one other thing to post and that's the state of the ads. One of the more frequent questions I'm asked is how well the site treats me back. As you can see, the revenue generated went up by quite a bit. Just think how good it'll be when the pageviews grow!
Please note that in the same frame of time I've spent about $1700 on server costs so while the $554 is nice it doesn't quite cover things yet. Yet.
First, let's talk about stuff that is upcoming. Really there are only a couple things that I can see on the immediate horizon now that we have a couple dark themes people seem to like. The first is that the arcade is going to be going through a lot of changes and a huge facelift. Right now it's very basic because I'm only testing base functionality. If I added a lot of games to it then if they had to reset again it would be a pain. So I'm taking that slowly. But it's coming along nicely.
The second thing is Zappit's Comic Collective efforts, which I really appreciate. He's looking into getting someone to revamp our front page (which sucks!) and that'll help everyone out.
Other things that are currently happening are things like FigmentPez getting his very own sub board. Dude has single-handedly brought in more new users and traffic than any of the rest of us combined - and that includes me. So I gave him his own little place where he can play around all he wants.
You all also know about the styles changes that I made just today. Added some dark themes and got rid of a few that were either too broken to keep or were unused. I'll be adding one more and that's it. I think we're done tweaking the styles. Any more and it gets difficult to load anything on the system.
Now to the fun part for me - NUMBERS! We moved to XenForo in January of 2011 and I think it's been a good move for us. I initially liked vBulletin but it was very old, very bloated and the company that runs it pissed me off with their business practices. Now they are trying to depose customers who went from vB to Xenforo. So I may be getting a call or something. Hope so. XenForo didn't steal me away from them, I was pushed away by their terrible software and company.
Anyway, when we moved away there was an initial dropoff in traffic, but this is mostly due to all our links being simplified through the vB SEO, which did not transfer well to XF. So we lost our link placement in the major search engines and the spiders were unable to backtrace us for a time. This is evident in the early days when the visitors are way down.
Note that these numbers are based on January 5 - November 30 for both 2010 & 2011. Orange line is 2011, blue line is 2010.
First, let's look at overall traffic. (Note that I have 2 images per section - the number with trend line and the full graph. Trend line is full sized picture while the graph can be expanded to a larger picture.)
As you can see, we are down about 25,000 visits over this period. Not worried at all, though. Look at the trend line. For vB it was very steady. For XF it's a steady climb in the positive direction. In fact, the graph shows that starting about April, XF was at or exceeding visits over vB so when I do this again next year it'll be a net gain if we continue at our current pace.
But that's for ALL visits. Let's take a gander at unique visits, which is a better indicator of new blood being infused. Looks great to me! We are above last year by quite a ways and the trend line is again upward in direction! So we are growing and bringing in new people.
This one is a little more worrisome, but I don't know what exactly happened so I'm not putting much stock in it.
Pageviews are astronomically higher in vB than they are in XF. But again the trend for vB was downward and the trend for XF is upward. Should I be worried? I don't think so. Look at the main graph around June or so of last year. What the hell happened?!? Pageviews shot through the roof all sudden-like. Like from an average of about 20K/day to almost 40K/day. The Kanye thing happened in 2009 so that wasn't it. It may well remain a mystery.
This is another on that doesn't bother me that much. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who enter at a certain point and then leave the site altogether. A high bounce rate is bad. In this case we are up a truckload over the past year, but if you see the trend line, about June of last year (again with the June!!) something happened that took the vB bounce rate down from the 40% range to like 4%. Again, not sure what I did or what happened.
The next stat is how long people spent on our site. Again we are below last year but I'm not overly concerned. We are currently static or rising while vB was on a downward trend. And vB had an arcade. Once ours gets cracking it'll help this a lot.
Last, we're going to look at New vs. Returning visitors. We show a rise in both vB and XF but we have a larger number of New Visits with XF than did with vB, which is good.
So there you have it. We're doing very well under XF and we're still gaining new users and growing. Just one other thing to post and that's the state of the ads. One of the more frequent questions I'm asked is how well the site treats me back. As you can see, the revenue generated went up by quite a bit. Just think how good it'll be when the pageviews grow!
Please note that in the same frame of time I've spent about $1700 on server costs so while the $554 is nice it doesn't quite cover things yet. Yet.
