WSB
We count our stats with Google Analytics, which is the “gold standard” for impartial statistics measured by third-party software.
People who run websites can claim they have counted X visitors and X pageviews by looking at their own servers, but those numbers are usually inaccurately high because they don’t sort out “bots,” spammers, and other meaningless visits – Google Analytics does. However, Google Analytics does not currently have a public way to display traffic. We check it daily and usually highlight some traffic numbers on our “Advertise” page.
Among the examples:
More than 6 million pageviews in 2008 – four times 2007. We are currently averaging 22,000 pageviews a day. That’s from more than 7,000 homes/businesses visiting at least once daily – more than 18,000 visiting at least once weekly.
A visitor is not necessarily one person, so we say home/business — for example, if there are two people in your home, but they use the same connection, as most households do, they will be seen as the same “visitor” because they have the same IP address. Same thing for large organizations — almost everybody in the City of Seattle, whether it’s an officer at the precinct here in West Seattle or an office worker in a city department downtown, shows up as the same IP address.
As for where they’re from, you can’t narrow it down precisely unless their IP is specifically labeled with a business or organization (and very few are). However, it’s predominantly Comcast and Qwest, which of course are West Seattle’s major internet providers; there also are many major organizations and businesses that check in from elsewhere in the city, and we know from e-mail correspondence (among other avenues) that those are WS people who check in from work; and bottom line, when it comes to repeat readers, unless you live or work in West Seattle, this information is so neighborhood-specific, there’s not much reason to hang out here.
You can also further sort visitors by whether they came to you via a Google search or whether they came in by a bookmark or other direct access — however, we know many people use Google to access everything, even if they know the URL, so just because somebody came here from a search for “west seattle blog” doesn’t mean they’re new!
There are some expatriates too. I heard one night from a woman on Fiji who has WS ties. And there’s a longtime WSB’er who had to move to Italy for work but checks in from time to time. We use a different provider for a “live log” to see who’s visiting the site at any given time (at busy times a new visitor arrives every few seconds) – and in fact, in the past half-hour, we’ve had somebody from an ISP in Norway and from one in France.
Big ramble but that’s what I can tell you about traffic. The pageview numbers are always particularly heartening because unlike newspaper sites, you can read almost all the home-page news here with only one “pageview” – we “jump” very few of our stories – so averaging almost 3 pageviews per visitor means they use other pages too, like the Forums, and/or the Crime Watch, Blogs, Events, Traffic (etc.) pages.