cvillenews.com Site Traffic?

Anonymous writes “So cvillenews.com has been up a while and seems to have a pretty decent crowd of regulars. But how about some numbers on the visitors the site sees? How much traffic does cvillenews get?” Keep reading for the answer.

The server that I host cvillenews.com on is in a bad way, and lacks anything in the way of decent logging tools and such. As a matter of fact, the drive that records logs ran out of space a few weeks ago, so I’m missing a few weeks of logs. So I’ve written a few shell scripts to extract some data from the log files, and I hope that this will suffice.

We’ll start off with the most useless of all statistics: hits. cvillenews.com gets between 1,000 – 9,000 hits per day. An average weekday sees about 4,000 hits.

We’ll take yesterday as an example to look more closely at a regular day. There were 6,900 hits from 263 unique users. About half of those users are from known-local addresses: intelos.net, cstone.net, cfw.com, virginia.edu, mediageneral.com, monticello.org, bnsi.net, charlottesville.org, ceva.net, rlc.net, cruchfield.com, snl.com, etc. etc. About a quarter come from possibly-local users connecting via aol.com, earthlink.net, va.sprint-hsd.net, starband.net, etc. And the remaining quarter came from interesting places like keck.hawaii.edu and c-span.org and unresolvable IP addresses. Some of our most regular users here come from that last bunch, mostly C’ville expatriates, from what I’ve gathered on the boards.

Taking a step back to the last week we see 1,033 unique users. (Due to dial-up modem users with ever-changing Internet addresses, that’s probably more like 800 or so.) The population increases to just over 2,000 if you look at a month. The conclusion that I draw from this is that we have a core group of a few hundred users that visit “obsessively” (see the recent poll on the topic), a thousand or so that visit regularly, and folks that discover the site and promptly forget it. (Or run screaming to the relatively safety of the streets after reading the discussions.)

Weekends are the slowest for traffic (and posts, consequently), as a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: why should I add news to the site, since nobody looks at the site on the weekends? So, of course, nobody looks at the site on weekends because there’s nothing new. Oh, well.

As long as I’m spouting statistics, I may as well point out how most people get here. The vast majority of visitors (well over 75%) simply type in the address or use a bookmark. This is good, because it means that random people aren’t finding the site due to crazy search terms in Google and wasting my bandwidth. Which leads me to search engines. None of them lead here except for Google. We get some pretty crazy results. Here are some recent terms that brought up cvilenews.com in Google and led people here:

Meadowcreek Parkway

meredith richards

ClearChannel monopoly

D&R Development

Gaylon Beights

Lee Danielson

aolian islands

bike box portland maine airport

curfew law scenario

Charlottesville local news

STEPHEN MALKMUS IS A SNOB

charlottesville recycling

david allen coe cum stains

domestic terrorism charlottesville

hook charlottesville

ice-cream environment vermont

ron martin appliances charlottesville

ludicrous mike tyson quote

cville weekly paper

Colin Rolph

oxymoron sculptures

why northerners suck

labor action group Charlottesville

Maurice Jones Virginia Charlottesville

michael spicer tortola

Charlottesville local news

Gaylon Beights

Judah Friedlander everyday video

Reid Nagle SNL Securities

cville waldo

george loper

kevin armstrong

law professor abraham student

malicious wounding law

progress on the budget with city council 2003

martin luther king plagerism thesis

Weird.

Anyhow, that’s pretty much the basic data that I can easily extract from these log files. I hope to get the site moved to a new server at my apartment in the next week or two, and I should be able to get some more useful data from that.