Aerie Stats

On the eve of the first birthday for the Aerie, I would like to present some of the statistics for the past year.

Here is a chart of the views broken down by month for the past twelve months

Table 1

Note that the first 4 months were very poor indeed for views.  November and December ‘08 only got a combined viewing of 81.  January and February of this year were not much better but I was greatly pleased over the increase from the previous two months.  Things really began to take off this past March.  Notice the large spike in May.  It steadied off during the summer and even took a slight dip but took off again two months ago in September.  Last month, October, saw a daily average of 1,311 views.  The views for November to date 11.10.09 are 12,603 which puts the Aerie on track for well over 1,000 views a day for the rest of the month.

There is a large dip showing in the last month, but remember that we are still in just the second week of November and on track for an even better month than October.

Here is a table showing monthly views and averages in non-graph form

Table 2

The best single day was just a couple of weeks ago.  Thursday, October 29th, the Aerie got 1,715 views and a monthly average of 1,311.  Over all for the past twelve months the daily average is 652, but this is skewed dramatically by the sparse first couple or three months.  With views now averaging well over 1,000 a day this overall monthly average is sure to rise.

As for views for individual posts, the Aerie has 375 posts.  On average over a year this comes to just a small fraction over 1 per day.  The majority of these came in the first half of the year when I was posting nearly every day and sometimes two or three times a day.  My pace has slackened off considerably the past six months.  As for average of views:posts it averages to 550 per post.  But, this is GROSSLY misleading.  You can see this just by going down to the recent post Top Fifteen.

Here I show with photo representation (and links) the total views for my top fifteen view getters.  Here by calculation we can see that only 4% of the total posts got over 50% of the total views!

Now by avocation I am a Social Scientist who LOATHES statistics for the ways in which they can be manipulated to the users wishes.  So let me try to make some sense of all these numbers.  First, let’s ask just how it is that I am getting so an impressive number of views and second why such a small percentage of posts is responsible for the majority of views.

I am slightly, but not completely, saddened to say that the views are by and large attributable to the images therein.

I would LOVE to say that the superlative quality of my writing and sharp sardonic wit is what is creating the drove of views.  But, I can’t.  A simple peace sign from google images inserted into Give War A Chance caused the most meteoric rise in views in any post to date.   Since it was posted on August 31, it has garnered 6,714 views–95 views per day average.  Many of those days, at least ten of which, were completely dead days with no views at all.

The reason I am not COMPLETELY saddened is because a lot of the posts that are getting hits for the images are also examples of what I consider some of my best work.  Give war A Chance is just one of these.  The Tet Offensive is another.  So while people may be coming for the images I comfort myself with the hopes that the main content will grab their attention.  Why would you come here looking for a Peace Sign if you were not interested in the culture that generated the symbol in the first place and once here you just might be grabbed by the irony of a peace sign in a post exhorting people to give WAR a chance.

Makes sense to me.

The Aerie has a lot of good writing.  Doc and I do a very good job.  We give a lot of good content and for the price you pay as a fraction of your Internet connection fees, we think it’s pretty damn good.  We try to keep it fresh.  We mix it up.  We use personal stories.  We are topical and we write to universal and timeless ideas.  And we are VERY humble–especially Doc.  In fact Doc believes himself to be the MOST humble writer on the World Wide Web, bar NONE!

And now I am rambling.  Tomorrow is the birthday.

If you are a regular reader here you can finish the rest of the last sentence.

And We . . . . .

Gryphon.