Every picture tells a story

Tuesday, February 06, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Yesterday, I showed some graphs produced by Google Analytics that tell a story about the readers of Scripting News. Perhaps I didn't provide enough detail to support one conclusion I drew: We don't get a lot of new readers here.  

I know that for a couple of reasons, and it's supported by Ian, who works at Coremetrics, a company that is in the business of analyzing web traffic.  

1. Even though it shows that 46 percent of the traffic are first timers, that's based on a four day sample, of which two days were weekend days. Traffic patterns change on the weekend, esp for a business oriented site like Scripting News.  

2. I could compare it to the graphs for the XML-RPC site, which I also host, a relatively high flow site. Its traffic is almost entirely new people. It's not a blog, it's a reference site, with several popular specs that are widely pointed to.  

Over time the graph for Scripting News will likely skew even more toward repeat business. 

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, I'm just sharing something I've learned. I've deleted some personal comments about this, which are completely ridiculous. These no doubt are the people who edit my Wikipedia bio.