Forum:RationalWiki viewership
A lot of people have prophesied the doom of RW. I think they're partially right and partially wrong. FuzzyCatPotato of the Illegal Mittens (talk/stalk) 05:29, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
Losing users[edit]
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. FᴜᴢᴢʏCᴀᴛPᴏᴛᴀᴛᴏ, Esϙᴜɪʀᴇ (talk/stalk) 05:29, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
Losing readers[edit]
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? oʇɐʇoԀʇɐϽʎzznℲ (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)

