cybersoc stats for april 2007

Because April was an unusual month, I’ve spent a little bit more time looking at the monthly statistics cybersoc.com than I normally would.

For the 15 days leading up to the horrific Virginia Tech massacre, this blog served up an average of 238 page impressions per day. On top of that is an approximately equal number of people reading via RSS, some of which don’t click through, others of which do and are thus double counted.

On the 16th, the day of the massacre and my coverage of it here, there were 4,887 page views and, the following day when I wrote a post second guessing the way journalists, including myself, had flocked to the blogs in the aftermath of that massacre, 5,198 page views. The long tail of traffic sloped downwards, reaching approximate double the previous page impression average for the month, before a post by Kevin over on Strange bumped the page views up to 838 again. Only on the last three days of the month, Sat – Mon, did traffic start to look “normal” again:

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For the month, there were a total of 22,219 page loads and 16,284 unique visitors.

Since I have the screenshot, I thought I’d also share the month on month statistics:

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As I always say, I’m not sure these metrics matter as much with blogs as they do for static websites since at least half of the readers of this blog do so via their RSS reader and rarely, if ever, click through. Here’s what feed reader’s they’re using, according to feedburner:

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It would be interesting to see how each individual post does on technorati, which counts inbound links to it, or on del.icio.us. Certainly the number of inbound links to cybersoc.com went up in response to the Virginia Tech posts but the del.icio.us links seem to have held at their usual level.

I also take Graham’s point that it’s quality, not quantity, that counts when it comes to readers.

So thanks, readers, for stopping by – and an even bigger thanks to those who commented, linked, bookmarked or talked about something you spotted here. ;-)