RD.net traffic fall thread

[Apollonius]

Watching Alexa.com on RD.net traffic

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/richarddawkins.net

One week ago, site was ranked 16,033 (busiest site on the net would be #1)
Now it's 26,660

Big fail

Stats are way down any way you measure it, except for searches, they are up.

[goodboyCerberus]

Meh, I don't see a trend yet.

[j.mills]

Well, you wouldn't see a trend yet - that graph doesn't extend past 'the crisis'!

[lpetrich]

Notice the fluctuations in Alexa's graph -- looks like small-number statistics. The relative sampling error for N samples is 1/sqrt(N), meaning that you need 100 samples to get 10% accuracy and 10,000 to get 1% accuracy.

So if RDF's visitors include only 100 Alexa-toolbar users each days, then Alexa's numbers for RDF will vary by about 10% due to their comings and goings. If only 10 Alexa-toolbar users each day, then 30%.

To see that effect in action, look at high-traffic vs. low-traffic. The high-traffic ones have less fluctuation and more steady variation than low-traffic ones.

[CJ]

site.JPG (49.76 KiB) Viewed 1800 times

[cowiz]

To be fair they have disabled the forum and not replaced it yet - let's take a look again in a few months. I suspect they will rebuild their traffic quite quickly.

[M]

How have they got any traffic when nobody can post? Pointless exercise IMO.

[ficklefiend]

I think the point is that the forum wasn't just a useless appendix to RD.net

[Matt H]

To be fair they have disabled the forum and not replaced it yet - let's take a look again in a few months. I suspect they will rebuild their traffic quite quickly.

Agreed.

[lordpasternack]

Pageviews/user is hitting a big low just now...

[CJ]

Currently the lowest in the last 6 months.

[Shrunk]

I'm not quite understanding this thread.

Is traffic on the (now defunct) forum and the RDF "front page" totalled together and counted as one thing? If so, the drop in traffic is hardly surprising. I wouldn't expect people to spend hours staring at a static forum.

The only thing that would seem meaningful to me is if visits to the front page alone had dropped significantly since the demise of the forum, irrespective of any decreases in forum traffic. Would that be captured in in the data in any way?

[lordpasternack]

Shrunk - as has already been mentioned here or in another thread - it demonstrates just how much currency the forum held in the eyes of RD.net users. It wasn't some minor part - but absolutely integral - and Josh Timonen, and by association Richard Dawkins himself should have appreciated this more at the outset, and perhaps they'd have spent a little more thought on the changes they were drafting, and how they planned to implement them, if indeed they decided to implement them after that period of analysis and reflection.

It is perhaps in particular response to Timonen's widely reported Twitter post that it is "sloppy and lazy" to have forum instead of "a proper website". Timonen totally undermined the forum from the word go - and I suspect Dawkins never saw to challenge any aspect of this.

[AshtonBlack]

Also, the normal procedure is to have the "updated" website up and running at the same time as the old. Then at a given point the DNS records are changed and after replication, new webiste is there.

Not shut down webiste....wait.... wait... new website.

Very unprofessional.