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. αδελφός ΓυζζγςατΡοτατο (talk/stalk) 05:29, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Losing users[edit]

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

RW Stats 15-Dec.png

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:

RW Rank 16-Jan.PNG

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

RW Traffic 16-Jan.png

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? FuzzyCatPotato!™ (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)