As I said in my Happy New Year post, I usually summarise things on my birthday, but site statistics is an exception. I have traditionally posted information about website statistics in the beginning of January and this year will be no exception. Last year’s results were fairly straightforward and saw a steady rise of traffic. In 2009 the traffic peaked and then started dropping for some reason:
Statistics and graph from StatCounter.
Statistics and graph from StatCounter.
And some comparisons with previous years (monthly averages):
2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | Change | |
Page loads: | 994 | 1806 | 3231 | 3522 | +9% |
Unique visitors: | 479 | 952 | 2081 | 2323 | +12% |
Returning visitors: | 184 | 318 | 475 | 528 | +11% |
If I were running a business, these figures would make me worried, but fortunately, I’m running this website mostly because I enjoy writing regularly and share whatever I write with whomever is interested in reading, so I’m not that worried. The most likely reason for the decrease in traffic is a greatly diminshed posting frequency, mostly because of my focus on studying Chinese (see here, for instance). If I don’t do anything drastic, it would be reasonable to believe that next years report will show figures in the red, but in this case, I sincerely believe that qualitty trumps quantity. If people who look for things I can provide find my website and people who are intersted in what I’m doing here in Taiwan can find that, I’m fully satisfied.