Webstats review
Jul. 24th, 2004 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indriI've been running two webcounters on my site now for about a week. I've no way to know if this has been a "typical" week, but if so, the results have been quite sobering.
I'm averaging about 60 pageloads and 25 visitors a day.
Types of visitor, in rough order of frequency, from most to least common:
people who come to use the recs page, without looking at the rest of the site;
people who arrive via All About Spike or some other author listing or recs page, and who stay to read a couple of stories;
people googling for pictures of BtVS characters or lemurs;
lost folk who google for unlikely combinations of words, and who are more likely than the others to be from non-English-speaking countries;
people who have found the URL via Coquette's website or FangedFour and, on realising I don't write Spike/Angelus, leave almost immediately afterwards;
people who arrive with no related link, suggesting they have bookmarked the site or in some other way have recorded the URL;
people who find my site by googling for specific story titles, which suggests they've heard of me somehow;
someone in Boston who spent most of her Sunday afternoon working her way through my entire story archive (thanks!).
The upshot is that my recs page provides a valuable community service but that not terribly many people read my stories at my website (I'm archived in multiple places so my total readership is certainly higher). I can't contribute yet to discussions as to the ratio of readers to feedback as I haven't received any fb this week.
Edited to add: My ratio seems to be one actual reader per eight pagehits. Even so, this makes my annual website readership of the order of 2750 people. If it's always the same readers visiting, then this figure is lower; if pagehits spike whenever a new story is put up, then the figure is higher. This doesn't count those who read my fic on popular websites, of course, and I strongly suspect that those readers must considerably outnumber my website visitors (but this suspicion is based on nothing more than my own early fic-reading habits). All these figures compare well to print runs of first novels in Australia, which I understand are usually at the 3000 copy mark.
I wriite fiction because I enjoy it, even though I am apt to moan here about the difficult bits. I wrote for fifteen years without showing anything I wrote to more than a few people; I would hardly have persisted if I didn't find the act of writing satisfying in itself. But it's always gratifying to know that I have readers.
I'm averaging about 60 pageloads and 25 visitors a day.
Types of visitor, in rough order of frequency, from most to least common:
The upshot is that my recs page provides a valuable community service but that not terribly many people read my stories at my website (I'm archived in multiple places so my total readership is certainly higher). I can't contribute yet to discussions as to the ratio of readers to feedback as I haven't received any fb this week.
Edited to add: My ratio seems to be one actual reader per eight pagehits. Even so, this makes my annual website readership of the order of 2750 people. If it's always the same readers visiting, then this figure is lower; if pagehits spike whenever a new story is put up, then the figure is higher. This doesn't count those who read my fic on popular websites, of course, and I strongly suspect that those readers must considerably outnumber my website visitors (but this suspicion is based on nothing more than my own early fic-reading habits). All these figures compare well to print runs of first novels in Australia, which I understand are usually at the 3000 copy mark.
I wriite fiction because I enjoy it, even though I am apt to moan here about the difficult bits. I wrote for fifteen years without showing anything I wrote to more than a few people; I would hardly have persisted if I didn't find the act of writing satisfying in itself. But it's always gratifying to know that I have readers.
