Forum:RationalWiki viewership

A lot of people have prophesied the doom of RW. I think they're partially right and partially wrong. 05:29, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Losing users
First, the partially wrong. No, RW's not hemorrhaging editors or edits:



This seems to be the most common complaint; it's also wrong. It could be growing faster, but editor-wise RW 2015 is a lot better than RW 2013 or RW 2014. If anyone has any ideas on how to better grow the editorbase, do tell. 05:29, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Losing readers
Second, the partially right. RW is hemorrhaging viewers.

From http://siterankdata.com/rationalwiki.org:



From http://www.rank2traffic.com/rationalwiki.org:



According to the Rank2Traffic graph, RW's max was 2.2 million monthly viewers in October 2014; it's now 1.4 million, 36.3% less. This is reflected in RW's increasing Alexa rank.

What, if anything, can RW do to get more readers? What did it do that caused a reduction in readers? 05:29, 10 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Those estimated numbers are pretty much nonsense. Literally all sites of this sort are completely spurious bullshit. Alexa is the best (or least worst) and even that's (famously) spurious bullshit.
 * The pageview logs from the squids, which we have back to late 2012 on squid1 and mid-2013 on squid2, would tell the truth. Of course this involves a bit of chewing on them. With the weird Squid error artifacts I noted in the Saloon Bar, I may have to script something to process from the NCSA logs (which have IP and user-agent data so are private information I can't just put up). But the pageview logs (which are OK to make public) should be fine. I won't put those up right now (they're a third of a gig each compressed), but here's a simple count of hits for all months from the two squids. These numbers include MediaWiki calling itself, page fragments, etc, but the software is substantially identical over these numbers:
 * {|class="wikitable" style="text-align:right;"

!month !squid1 !squid2 !|total
 * 11/12
 * 5027484
 * 5027484
 * 12/12
 * 15785884
 * 15785884
 * 01/13
 * 18140551
 * 18140551
 * 02/13
 * 17999090
 * 17999090
 * 03/13
 * 20268004
 * 20268004
 * 04/13
 * 7283349
 * 7283349
 * 05/13
 * 1684963
 * 1684963
 * 06/13
 * 18583027
 * 16861617
 * 35444644
 * 07/13
 * 17576295
 * 18409692
 * 35985987
 * 08/13
 * 19377105
 * 18378993
 * 37756098
 * 09/13
 * 20214227
 * 19081687
 * 39295914
 * 10/13
 * 23382660
 * 22042778
 * 45425438
 * 11/13
 * 22286646
 * 21762997
 * 44049643
 * 12/13
 * 23514237
 * 23523272
 * 47037509
 * 01/14
 * 22958268
 * 22692283
 * 45650551
 * 02/14
 * 22464156
 * 22462984
 * 44927140
 * 03/14
 * 23059092
 * 24779760
 * 47838852
 * 04/14
 * 23804404
 * 25157735
 * 48962139
 * 05/14
 * 24317421
 * 23910134
 * 48227555
 * 06/14
 * 24673399
 * 24688722
 * 49362121
 * 07/14
 * 26567723
 * 27270514
 * 53838237
 * 08/14
 * 26146242
 * 26430402
 * 52576644
 * 09/14
 * 26880227
 * 27183816
 * 54064043
 * 10/14
 * 29445564
 * 28997245
 * 58442809
 * 11/14
 * 28152330
 * 28112848
 * 56265178
 * 12/14
 * 27529894
 * 27483612
 * 55013506
 * 01/15
 * 30201174
 * 30174997
 * 60376171
 * 02/15
 * 26368335
 * 27364322
 * 53732657
 * 03/15
 * 28765537
 * 28510227
 * 57275764
 * 04/15
 * 29601977
 * 30419035
 * 60021012
 * 05/15
 * 28424669
 * 28891102
 * 57315771
 * 06/15
 * 26509675
 * 25802311
 * 52311986
 * 07/15
 * 25629529
 * 26776716
 * 52406245
 * 08/15
 * 27315983
 * 28044613
 * 55360596
 * 09/15
 * 27436294
 * 27863103
 * 55299397
 * 10/15
 * 29467675
 * 31110524
 * 60578199
 * 11/15
 * 29412679
 * 30362141
 * 59774820
 * 12/15
 * 27280365
 * 28145833
 * 55426198
 * }
 * 04/15
 * 29601977
 * 30419035
 * 60021012
 * 05/15
 * 28424669
 * 28891102
 * 57315771
 * 06/15
 * 26509675
 * 25802311
 * 52311986
 * 07/15
 * 25629529
 * 26776716
 * 52406245
 * 08/15
 * 27315983
 * 28044613
 * 55360596
 * 09/15
 * 27436294
 * 27863103
 * 55299397
 * 10/15
 * 29467675
 * 31110524
 * 60578199
 * 11/15
 * 29412679
 * 30362141
 * 59774820
 * 12/15
 * 27280365
 * 28145833
 * 55426198
 * }
 * 30362141
 * 59774820
 * 12/15
 * 27280365
 * 28145833
 * 55426198
 * }
 * }
 * }


 * tl;dr steadily increasing year-on-year - David Gerard (talk) 16:06, 10 January 2016 (UTC)