Forum:RationalWiki viewership

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A lot of people have prophesied the doom of RW. I think they're partially right and partially wrong. Mʀ. Wʜɪsᴋᴇʀs, Esϙᴜɪʀᴇ (talk/stalk) 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. oʇɐʇoԀʇɐϽʎzznℲ (talk/stalk) 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? 32℉uzzy; 0℃atPotato (talk/stalk) 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:

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

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