3 million pageviews this year

Written By: - Date published: 12:13 am, December 23rd, 2010 - 26 comments
Categories: The Standard - Tags:

Yesterday, we hit 3 million pageviews for 2010. Today, we’ll have our millionth visit. 45% growth on 2009 even with the few days we were offline and a couple when stats data wasn’t captured. It’s not just a small cadre of hardcore fans (although, do we love you guys and girls) – over 212,000 unique visitors have visited The Standard this year.

For a long time, our busiest day remained the Tuesday before the 2008 election (I think there must have been news stories about the site that day). But the title was finally claimed by February the 15th, the day that we launched The Standard 3.0 with the new layout. It didn’t hold first place long though, being knocked off by February – the day Parliament resumed. The record was held by that day until October 27th when the Twittersphere went crazy for Lynn’s piece on the Assange persecution and we got huge viewership from Northern Europe.

Of course, it’s the commenters and guest posters as much as the regular authors who make the site. Over 93,000 comments this year (first one at 5am on New Year’s Day), 125 guest posts, 350 open mikes, and 1900 posts by the authors.

It wouldn’t happen without Lynn though. He keeps the site running with countless hours of work. During the big Easter crash he worked non-stop for three days. At least now we have some donation and ad money coming in we can afford better servers (hope they can handle 5 million pageviews next year, Lynn).

Thanks a lot for the money you contribute and for putting up with the ads, we really do appreciate it. That money has relieved a big burden on Lynn’s wallet and allowed us to start building up a war-chest for election year fun, which we hope you’ll be part of.

Well, that’s it for me for the year – apart from one on the GDP numbers if they’re interesting and one more on the new economy if I can be bothered finishing it. Have a great Christmas and New Year’s, y’ll.

26 comments on “3 million pageviews this year ”

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  1. r0b 1
    23 December 2010 at 12:24 am

    Bravo The Standard community. Nice note to finish the year on.

    As of Thursday I’m off too. As ever I will try and spend January as far away from technology as I can get. So I may not be back until late Jan / start of Feb.

    Merry Christmas to one and all. Be safe on the roads if you’re driving. And see y’all in 2011…

  2. Colonial Viper 2
    23 December 2010 at 1:45 am

    Merry Christmas to all, keep safe and keep happy.

    Its all hands on deck for 2011 😀

  3. felix 3
    23 December 2010 at 2:00 am

    “over 212,000 unique IP addresses have visited The Standard this year.”

    But to be fair, half of those belong to “comedy” 😉

    Take care all.

    • lprent 3.1
      23 December 2010 at 3:05 am

      Nah, he only used less than 10 all up. I only had to put in two to close him off when he got banned. Must be a problem when his ISP gave him what looks like static addresses.

  4. lprent 4
    23 December 2010 at 2:12 am

    It has been a good year apart from the overloading of the server earlier in the year. Moving to a new server helped a lot, and we have some time before that gets overwhelmed. But I’m likely to add another server early next year (in a different country) to spread the load. There is no way that I want to get into having over 50% average load during the day for a week or two again. Turned my hair even more grey.

    On thing you notice when you look at this site against other blogs public info is the time people spend reading per visit and the depth that they delve into the site per visit (and our lowish bounce rate). That comes from the writers in both the posts and the comments. People just like reading well argued and often robust opinion… I know that I do.

    That Assange post did get rather a lot of twittering…. I notice that my posts that get a lot of page views tend to be those I write when I am a wee bit irritated. No-one reads me when I’m calm and collected. Perhaps this could be regarded as being the Beck effect.

    And Marty – just be glad you can’t see the hits (rather than page views) or data volumes transferred. There are millions of those per month and at least several gigabytes per day respectively. It is all of the images…. Even with telling every browser to cache all of the bulky bits..

    • lprent 4.1
      23 December 2010 at 2:19 am

      Oh and that is 212k unique visitors which is not unique IPs. As far as I’m aware it is effectively mostly unique cookies. If they have been on the site previously on the same machine and don’t clear cookies it remains the same. Falls back on IPs only if it doesn’t get cookies

      • mummybot 4.1.1
        23 December 2010 at 2:47 am

        What can I say but ‘woop woop’!

      • Lanthanide 4.1.2
        23 December 2010 at 10:44 am

        There was a period a couple of months back where both my work and home computers seemed to have lost their cookies – my name and ’email’ were not automatically entered there for me. So that could be contributing a small amount to the numbers if it happened to multiple people and not just me.

        • lprent 4.1.2.1
          23 December 2010 at 2:40 pm

          That type of thing happens periodically and as far as I can see is always to do with the client side browser. In this case analytics doesn’t use our cookie that we set for your machine to remember your comment details. It uses a completely separate one.

          Thats why these are not precise measures (rather like polls). But I’m usually more interested in the trend lines (rather like my attitudes on polls)

  5. joe bloggs 5
    23 December 2010 at 8:14 am

    At least now we have some donation[s]…

    anonymous no doubt

    • Marty G 5.1
      23 December 2010 at 8:25 am

      there’s a ‘donate’ button in at the top right, joe. Don’t worry we won’t reveal how much you’ve given us.

      I’m not sure how much we get through the donations. I think in a good month it covers the server cost. Hardly fortunes.

    • lprent 5.2
      23 December 2010 at 10:32 am

      It comes through paypal and therefore is as anonymous as they let it be. There is some detail and most people don’t bother hiding who they are. Since Mike and I are the only people who can see them they are anonymous to everyone else.

      Big thanks to everyone that does donate. While we don’t personally acknowledge who does donate, we really appreciate it at many levels. Not the least of which is that it gives us an income stream outside of advertising and therefore helps preserve our independence.

  6. mickysavage 6
    23 December 2010 at 8:21 am

    Merry Christmas to everyone. To Lprent, Marty G, R0b, Irish, Eddie et al keep up the good work and may 2011 be even bigger and better than 2010.

    I seem to read the standard every day and comment most days. God knows what would have happened to business profitability if the Standard did not exist. If it was not around I would be a wealthier but much more poorly informed person.

  7. Ed 7
    23 December 2010 at 8:27 am

    Well done, and congratulations to The Standard.

    The site is nearly always in my “Most visited” list -I enjoy the many thoughtful posts and equally thoughtful comments. The proportion of ‘unthinking attack’ comments may have increased slightly – I suspect The Standard is being read more by supporters of the ‘Right’ and some travel here from the Sewer.

    Have blog statistics now been stopped? I cannot believe that the beached whale is more popular than The Standard . . .

    • Marty G 7.1
      23 December 2010 at 8:30 am

      he got a boost when he was exploiting sex attack victims to get his name in the news. Since then, he’s dwindled away to nearly nothing.

      when he’s next in his manic cycle he’ll come up with something else outrageous to get the attention he needs and his stats will go up again.

  8. Bunji 8
    23 December 2010 at 8:31 am

    Thanks Lynn for all your good work. It’s much appreciated.

    And yes, the last blog rankings seem to be December 2009, with a surge for the greasy one, with some of his criminal behaviour grabbing a lot of views that month. ‘Tis a shame to not see it updated.

    • lprent 8.1
      23 December 2010 at 10:25 am

      The most rational blog stats are now over at OpenParachute collected from public stats. The November ones are here. I’ve been thinking that I should add another stat collection at extreme or statcounter purely for those. But I’m a bit reluctant because of the extra page load time. I’ll test over xmas/new year.

      You can also get a probably inaccurate idea from alexa for things like pageviews per visit, time per visit, bounce, search engines and entry/exit. It is inaccurate because it relies on people putting plugins on their browser and acceding to some monitoring of their browsing. So it is self-selected. The absolute stats are off by quite a lot because of the self-selection, but the percentage and per visit stats broadly agree with what we see on google analytics and awstats.

      • Bunji 8.1.1
        23 December 2010 at 11:27 am

        hmm, the standard and red alert aren’t on those blog stats, but lots of other “interesting” ones are. At no.2 New Zeal is more US-focussed, even if written by crazy ex-ACT vice-president (and ZAP believer) Trevor Loudon. Mainly trying to tarnish everyone on the left by calling them communists. Classy.
        Quite a few other blogs that are only kinda NZ ones too. And no way to split sites out by content (politics etc)… I guess that stuff’s all quite difficult to do…

        • lprent 8.1.1.1
          23 December 2010 at 2:32 pm

          But it is pretty interesting overall.

          The interesting thing on newzeal to me was the high readership – and virtually no comments. There was a post I read on newzeal about passing his second million page views (I think) where he explicitly says that it was from his US readership and that was where his focus was these days.

          I never bothered to read the site until it started to show up in the stats because I find it terminally boring with a emphasis on ingroup polemics. I guess he is now doing it for a global ingroup and it has bugger all to to with newzeal(and)

  9. Bright Red 9
    23 December 2010 at 9:44 am

    that’s one page load every 10 seconds day and night, every day of the year. busy!

    captcha: achieve!

    • lprent 9.1
      23 December 2010 at 10:12 am

      I’d love it if it was even..

      But well over 95% of the traffic is from NZ and the site goes pretty dead overnight. Usually the only traffic then is from the northern hemisphere, and the usual background of the search spiders and spambots, which aren’t counted on this measure anyway but account for over a third of the total traffic.

      What worries me is when we get a spike due to a topic of interest. Then we get tens of page views per second. That is what I have to do capacity planning on.

      • Bright Red 9.1.1
        23 December 2010 at 2:45 pm

        it’s kind of like electricity I guess, your capacity has to be capable of handling the peaks even though a lot of it will be sitting idle a lot of the time.

  10. Deadly_NZ 10
    23 December 2010 at 9:29 pm

    I am one of the nov spike but i stayed a great site have a good xmas / new year. Don’t forget its gonna be a big year 2011 gotta get the Nats and crowd out of office

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