By The Numbers

SAN FRANCISCO, 1 June — kk, my last NBI post! 😛 I came to the project late, so even though it’s finished for now, I’m still “getting started!” hahaha

I thought I’d share iRez’ site traffic, partly as info for New Bloggers, partly as Botgirl and Trilby both joined iRez in May and have already had an impact, and partly as 1 June marks 2 years of iRez here on WordPress.com / Automattic.

This blog actually started a little over a year before that, in 2009 April, over on Blogger. Ze Moo famously pushed me to move to WordPress, to put our blog where my Free Culture mouth was. Blogger was a great platform back then, and it’s gotten even better since then, Tumblr is an amazing platform with a lot of traffic, a lot of energy, and a really compelling platform space. Still, Open Source WordPress has not only been an ideologically appropriate platform, it’s also been a wonderfully functional home.

So what of our traffic here at iRez on WordPress.com? As you see, we’ve had 142,590 hits in 2 years. Of course there are lots of sites that get over 142,000 hits every day! Still, this is easily better than double what we did over on Blogger, so I feel fairly good about being here. In addition to Botgirl and Trilby joining Aero, Agnes, Xue and myself in May, the posts in 2012 have been more frequent, consistent, and regular, and I think you see all of these factors in our growing bar chart.

Those of you on Blogger, Tumblr, or WordPress.org (custom install) can run Google Analytics and get better stats. I definitely encourage you to. Those of us on WordPress.com are limited to the stats that Automattic is willing to let us see as they block Google Analytics. The stat I’m really missing is average length of visit. No doubt most peeps would take 10 hits with a 20 minute average time over 10,000 hits with a 20 millisecond average time. My sense is that average times are very low.

SECOND LIFE
Of all the many, amazing blogs I saw at NBI, none were from Second Life. Perhaps this is because of the circles the NBI founders traveled in, or perhaps SL while still an MMO is more different from most of the others. In fact there are zillions of great SL blogs. The 2 categories I think I’ve seen the most of are SL Fashion blogs and what I guess I’d call “SL Tech” blogs: blogs about infrastructure, building and architecture, Linden Lab policies & politics, Grid status, News & Events, etc.

As it happens, all of the authors here at iRez are from SL. Mostly that’s just because it’s where I grew up. I’m hoping to add voices from other virtual worlds ASAP!

Obviously if iRez were a WoW blog, it’d probably be very different in many ways. I don’t think being an SL blog has limited our traffic, my sense is that the SL Fashion and Tech blogs do really well. But iRez is also a Vaneeesa’s World blog, and adjusting your brain to that space might take some time. The best I can say is that what we’re doing here makes a whole lot of sense… to me! (hahaha)

SEARCH RESULTS
It’s interesting that month in and month out, 2 posts from the iRez archive have consistently ranked high and gotten a lot of traffic: “Unitards & Catsuits” and “Peter Eisenman.” I don’t really have data on who visits these 2 posts so much, but here’s my guess:
• Arrived at thru search (not regular readers or link referrals)
• Unitards & Catsuits by peeps looking for, hmm, “Fetish Fun”
• Peter Eisenman by college students writing term papers

Whether having these “hit” posts is good or bad is hard to say. They probably bring in a lot of new readers, which is nice, but those readers are probably extra likely to be one-visit readers.

Anyway, the main point in sharing these stats with you is simply to say keep at it, your audience will grow! I’m sure your audience can grow a lot faster than ours did, then again, since Art | Culture | Activism | Identity might be a specific or unusual space for a blog, you could say we’ve done pretty well for an idiosyncratic species on a minor planet! 🙂

Happy Blogging!

— Aero, Agnes, Botgirl, Trilby, Vaneeesa & Xue