I crunched the numbers on the traffic on Richmond Sunlight throughout the 2007 session. The site launched on the first day of the session. These numbers are from carefully-scrubbed traffic logs — no bots, spiders trackbacks, or pings are included in the count, so it’s all human traffic. (The numbers are 300% larger without being scrubbed.)
Traffic
- 148,889 page views
- 26,840 visits
- 5.55 pages/visit
- 13,984 unique visitors
Referrers
- 47% of people loaded the site directly or by e-mail
- 11% came via Google
- 14% came via miscellaneous Virginia political blogs
Geography
- 98% of visitors from the US
- 73% of them from Virginia
- 24% of them from the Richmond area
- 10% from the Charlottesville area
- 6% from the Hampton Roads area
- 5% from the Fairfax area
Browsers
- 25% of people using Firefox
- 5% of people using Safari
Misc.
- the search page was the most popular page
- 774 comments were posted to 233 bills
- 6.8% of all bills were commented on
- 2,902 tags were applied to 1,241 bills
- 36% of all bills were tagged
- every single bill was viewed at least twice
- 90% of people visiting the site were using a high-speed connection
Unusually for me, I went into this with no expectations, so I can’t say whether these numbers are good or bad. Having 5.55 pages viewed per visit is pretty great, and so is having half of all visits being direct. I attempted to debug the SQL query that reported that every single bill was viewed twice, figuring that couldn’t possibly be right, so I was surprised by that.
“# 774 comments were posted to 233 bills”
Forgive me if this is posted some place on the site, but I didn’t see anything about it. Why can you only comment on certain bills and not all? For instance:
No comments allowed
http://www.richmondsunlight.com/bill/2007/sb1060/
Comments permitted
http://www.richmondsunlight.com/bill/2007/hb1908/
And those numbers look great! Good numbers for Richmond. I imagine with more exposure, the numbers will grow for NOVA and the Beach.
What an utterly fantastic piece of work, Waldo. Thank you very much.
Just a couple of days ago I disabled comments on bills that failed, only allowing comments on bills that have passed. There doesn’t seem much point in continuing discussion on dead bills (plus it’s that many more comment forms for spammers to target) post-session. I need to figure out some language to drop in there to make it more clear, though — right now, as you discovered, it’s just baffling to anybody who goes to the page seeking to comment.
Well that explains that. Thanks.
Great stats and not surprising–Richmond Sunlight is great.
Yay for miscellaneous Virginia blogs!
What?!? No stats on the cockfighting page?
If you have the capability, it might be interesting to see what percentage of visitors were coming from .gov ISPs. My old Sitemeter stats gave me that info and I thought it was interesting to see what schools were reading my blog.
“Geography
* 98% of visitors from the US
* 73% of them from Virginia”
Does that mean that 27% are out-of-staters getting ideas from us? That’s a scary thought.
Incredible site.
A big chunk of the Richmond contingent belonged to elected officials. This is just a fabulous site.
Great job, Waldo. I used “Richmond Sunlight” all the time this past session and found it very helpful. Thanks!
Yes, I would also like to see stats on the cockfighting bill. Like, what percentage of all the comments were comments about that bill?
I also used it the entire session, and linked to it frequently.
The cockfighting bill attracted 257 comments, perhaps 10 of which were worth the electrons they’re printed on.
It really is a great site — kudos! Love those Firefox stats :)
and I hadn’t seen the cockfighting bill until now… wow.