Just a little note

Can you post these kinds of statistics on a regular basis?

What is a head-scratcher for me is that if we have 700 unique visitors in 90 days, then the number of unique visitors on any two-week period will obviously be less, by an unknown number. 

Yet when I post a story (and I assume this applies to everyone), there are usually 2000+ visits in the two-week period following any posting. The hits then slow, but sometimes creep up to 4000+ over the next few months, and then pretty much stop. 

The possibilities I can see is that 1) our frequent visitors (some fraction of 700) are accessing every story several times, perhaps many times, to chalk up that many hits, or 2) a bunch of search engines and related robots hit new content pretty hard, and then over time slow and finally stop hitting them completely, or 3) we allow unregistered readers to access stories and there are lots of them. 

Good or bad story (based on feedback), it doesn't seem to matter. The hits follow a similar profile. 

Given that comments and feedback are always sparse, what authors want to know is "how many different actual people at least started to read my story".  I don't think the hit counts on stories are telling us that, and might be dominated by robots which perhaps index new content at a rapid rate, driving up the hits. 

I understand that it's easy to get a list of people who log into the site, but are the stories open to visitors (and robots) that don't log in? In other words, could the high hit count on the stories be due to 1) unregistered visitors, or 2) search robots or 3) just repeated visits from signed-in members?

Any data/thoughts along this line?

Shadar






 

Interesting post Shadar.  My take is that when there is a workshop, people know when it coming and hit it pretty hard in the first week.  And after about 3-4 weeks the hits go way down.  You may have something there with the robots. 

wrote:

Interesting post Shadar.  My take is that when there is a workshop, people know when it coming and hit it pretty hard in the first week.  And after about 3-4 weeks the hits go way down.  You may have something there with the robots. 

Even then, if there are only 700 unique visitors in 90 days, you obviously can't get 2000 different readers in two weeks.  So the hits are coming from somewhere or someone else other than those of us who log into the site. 

Shadar

I think I heard somewhere that on most websites, there are 10x as many lurkers as there are people with accounts. That makes sense to me. I know I typically only make an account if a site forces me to (like this one-- can't see attachments without registering).

I would not get to hung up on visitors. It is an interesting stat but the long term trend is more informative when compared against special events (i.e. workshops). As for the 4000 users, the big question should be:

How many of those 4000 logged in within the past year?

You are always going to have fake accounts created by potential hackers, people who moved on, people who lost their account info or email associated with it, and others whose accounts are long inactive. It is just the nature of things.

In my experience, activity and visits to this website comes in waves. We get a flush of content then user activity and interaction spikes. Then we go through a low period and everything drops. The something happens to cause a spike and the cycle starts all over again.

I read pretty fast, but a lot of folks don’t. Some people don’t have regular internet access, but they may at work. Maybe they just read one story at a time. Who knows.

I'm familiar with the confusion around web stats like "hits" and "unique views" when it comes to trying to work out how many people have read/looked at a story online. I'm pretty sure "bots" are identified by websites and not usually counted in these sort of numbers, From what I can infer, flagging up a story on a forum such as this will cause quite a lot of people to "check it out".

Then there are people who re-read stories, or parts of stories they really like on a weekly or twice-weekly basis. An author such as Shadar must have accrued so many fans over the years, and a chunk of those, I believe, will have beloved favourite stories/chapters/paragraphs that they revisit regularly.

Did 15% of the human race watch Gangnam Style once each? Or did 0.15% of it each enjoy the video a hundred times.... either way, it's mind-blowing.

The first post in this thread is about SWM having reached the milestone of 4,000 members. Four thousand. Fats says we can do better, and that's amazing.

On a personal note, I remember a day some point in 1997 or 98. The first time I found myself alone for the day with a modem, not in a workplace, but in a "safe" place. (I'm talking about a 14.4k dial-up modem, connected via a Serial cable to a PC running Windows 95.) My first opportunity to use the internet for the purpose of indulging my fetish. I found Shadar's stories. That morning I had wondered if I was the only person on Earth who got a "kick" from the idea of supergirls, and by the evening I knew that there were others like me.

Now, thanks to the efforts of so many people like Shadar, Fats and Lfan, I find myself part of a growing community of four thousand. Of course we can do better, but I just wanted to take a moment to just gaze in awe at the number 4,000 and to say thank you to everyone because it blows my mind.

I, for one, don't always log in when I come to the site, and I've read a lot of stories while not logged in.

I have to say, Conceptfan, your site still rocks the genre. Brilliant Work! Conceptfan's updated website here;

www.evilsupergirls.com/stories/index.html

Thanks for the nice words, Monty, but the site's not updated.
I just wanted to say "Wow, there's four thousand of us!" rather than plug my own site,

I had a similar epiphany when I discovered ConceptFan's stories and realized I wasn't the only one who fantasized about violent, super bad girls.