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Forum:RationalWiki viewership
A lot of people have prophesied the doom of RW. I think they're partially right and partially wrong. Fuzzy. Cat. Potato! (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. The FCP Foundation (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? Sir ℱ℧ℤℤϒℂᗩℑᑭƠℑᗩℑƠ (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)