London Irish
There goes a million...
By Griff
March 20 2012
In January this site nearly hit a million page views - as reported by SportNetwork's statistics. It gave hope that we'd actually cross that magical barrier in the near future. As it turns out we;ll have to wait a while for that to happen since our hosts changed their stats-reporting in February...
The Craic has grown in popularity quite remarkably since it began over a decade ago. The stats are, sadly now lost in the re-vamp but when we started this site was getting around 170,000 "hits" per month which ramped fairly linearly up to January of this year where we were hundreds short of 1,000,000.
A "hit" here is a page-view (stats reported by some sites include a "hit" for every single image or other component of a page meaning one person reading one page could be a multitude of "hits"), so if you read a thread on the message board or a story on the front-page it is counted as 1 hit. The waters are, however, muddied by the various web search engines which constantly scan the web looking to keep their search databases up-to-date. These web-spiders or web-crawlers often visit sites multiple times in order to collate the data and this skews the statistics massively. The old SN stats tried to remove the automated hits but, to a large extent, failed.
The change in February is to move to a Google-powered stats-gathering system which is, we're told, much better at removing the web-beasties and reporting only "real users". How much of this we believe is, pretty-much, irrelevant - it's the only system we have to count the traffic here and so we're now counting on a whole new scale. For reference, January (when the old and new stats were running side-by-side) - our near million-hit month, shows up as 440,517 hits on the new stats. Annoyingly the following February show as 446,956 - would that have broken the old "barrier" ? We'll never know.
Stats are, when all is said and done, only useful next to identically-measured others. We can compare our traffic against all the other sites on SN and that's really the only meaningful conclusion we can draw.
As with the old system we're still running around 6th on the network (5th out of the rugby sites) for all traffic - although we lag behind for Story Views (stories like this one, rather than standard message-board threads) as we publish less frequently than many other sites. I'd really like to put more stories up but I can't afford the time to commit to regular series. We struggle, more and more often recently, to find people to write match reports so we can't even consider running regular previews as some sites manage.
This is, as always, your site.If you have an idea that you think merits more than just a message-board post then, please, email the text to us at editors@londonirish.org and it will be put-up as a story. Our stories get syndicated onto NewNow so it will increase the audience and probably generate more discussion - more importantly for The Craic, it'll stop the site going offline when we don't publish for more than 14 days...
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Thanks Griff, nicely explained.
Have you shown it to the Arsenal Times fella on the publishers message-board?
"It's not the despair, Saints, I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand."
