Our Growing Community

[#1]

In my monthly operational review with the Directors and the CEO, Neil Laycock asked me to get some stats together of how the community site is doing. I've spent a few minutes to pull some stats together showing how we are doing right now in comparison to the end of our third quarter (October - December 07). Overall Community Site Visits. Q3 saw us averaging roughly 800 unique visits per day to the community site front page. During this quarter this has grown to 2000 visits a day, an overall growth of 150%! There have been couple significant traffic peaks in this period as well: Community Site visit Peaks

Date	Visits	Event
6th Dec 2007	2,671	Blog about Codemaster’s file sharing investigation hits The Reg.
9th Jan 2008	11,598	We send out an update on Postini and spam to our customers
2nd Feb 2008	3,454	February Newsletter linking to the Community site goes out.
22nd Feb 2008	9,513	Dave's iPlayer blog is Slashdotted.
5th Mar 2008	4,800	March Newsletter linking to the Community site goes out.

Now remember, these are just the peaks, each of these posts will have had a tail out from the back of it which isn't being accounted in those numbers. Also interesting is a significant swing in the balance of possible non customers viewing the website. In Q3 on average, 30% of views were coming from non PlusNet IP ranges. This has increased in Q4 to 54% of visits coming from non PlusNet IP ranges. Whether this down to our regular readers checking up more from work and other non home connections, or real external interested remains to be determined. Blog Content Looking at the blog stats, the most popular items have been our BBC iPlayer content. iPlayer content takes the top three spots of the top 10 most popular blog posts, totalling over 25000 permalink views. This is 73% of the permalink views of all the top 10 items! Other interesting statistics:

• We have 743 made blog posts since starting.
• There are 1,515 comments on those blog posts.
• Since installing Akismet (a Wordpress anti comment-spam plugin) in January, we've blocked 937 spam comments which is a pretty scary number compared to the number of legitimate posts since our first blog post (which was the 30th of August, 2006 btw!).

Forum Stats We have now over 8000 registered forum accounts, growing on average 23 accounts a day. We have a series of activities planned to increase this, but haven't had the opportunity to put them into play yet. On average, we have 66 people online at any one time. In Q3 the peak number for users online at any one time was 120. This has now increased to 160 users. We have over half a million posts over 60,000 topics. Those numbers do include the imported posts from the previous forums but are all still accessible. We are currently averaging 186 posts and 23 new topics a day. Peter Vaughan is still our most prolific poster, with a huge 13,099 posts. Next up is our very own Tommo with 10,275. I'm trailing far behind with a measly 716 posts. Must try harder Random Other Stats Over this quarter so far:

• Internet Explorer has made up 53.15% of the traffic
• Firefox next with 38.69%
• Safari and Opera next with 3.94% and 2.89% respectively
• We have had 219 visits to the community site from iPhones (is that Liam and Assos?)
• Over on Technorati, our Webauthority has grown to 38 from around 10.

[#2]

>> We have had 219 visits to the community site from iPhones (is that Liam and Assos?) Guilty for part at least 🙂

[#3]

>># We have had 219 visits to the community site from iPhones (is that Liam and Assos?) only 219? I regularly check the site from my iPhone (several times a day) when out and about, not sure when you class as the start of this quarter though, especially if it's like a plusnet year that starts in april rather than january....

[#4]

Out of interest, does the iPhone identify differently to the iPod touch? As I've certainly taken a look a few times using the latter, when I've been bored waiting for a train to depart from a station that's had wifi access.

[#5]

Er, I might be a culprit here too :) B.