200,000 Views
Posted by Brian Kelly on 29 Sep 2009
On 6 September 2008 I published a post entitled 100,000 Views which documented the date of this blog having received 100,000 views according to the usage statistics provided on the WordPress.com site. I described how:
“I’ve found it useful in the past to write about significant landmarks on this blog in order to provide some data which other bloggers may find useful in drawing parallels. And such factual data may also be useful in the various blog workshops which myself and colleagues have been running“.
Just over a year later, with the blog having yesterday received 200,000 views, this milestone provides another opportunity for some reflection. As can be seen from the graph, there has been a significant increase in the number of average monthly page views which began (coincidentally?) after the blog reached 100,00 views in September 2008.
There was a peak (of 9,108 views) the following month (October 2008) followed by a plateau of over 7,000 views until June 2009, which saw a new peak of 9,300 views. This peak coincided with work I had been involved in for a workshop on “Using the Social Web to Maximise Access to your Resources” – it would seem that the experiments (including gathering evidence of the influence of Twitter in generating traffic) were successful. However there has been a significant decrease in traffic since that peak, although the figures are still higher than a year ago (the dip could be accounted for by the summer holidays and a decrease in the numbers of posts while I was away at conferences recently – but could also reflect a more general decrease in blogging activities which some commentators have speculated about recently).
Although I recognise that it is not possible to gain a picture of the state of the blogosphere based on usage figures for a single blog (to say nothing of the view that there may be Lies, Dammed Lies, Blog Statistics and Unexpected Spikes) I hope this snapshot is of interest to others. It would be particularly interesting to hear if others are experiencing a downwards trend in light of the supposed move away from blogs to use of Twitter.
UK Web Focus (Brian Kelly) 
Andy Powell said
Congratulations.
Your capability for self-promotion never ceases to amaze!
Just out of interest, what’s a view – particularly in the context of reading via a feed reader?
Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) said
Hi Andy – I’m reporting on the stats provided in the WordPress.com’s administrators interface. I believe this is based on Google Analytics. You’re quite right to question what figures regarding views mean when people use an RSS reader to view the posts. I *think* RSS tools will result in one recorded download (view) per post which may then be accessed by more users of the same reader (i.e. one view by Google which amy then be viewed by many people who use Google Reader). However I’m still trying to find out if this is correct.