Celticsblog viewership up 209.4% in last year

[cdif911]

that's pretty impressive stuff, this place keeps growing and growing

(graph thanks to compete.com  awesome awesome site)

[Bahku]

that's pretty impressive stuff, this place keeps growing and growing

(graph thanks to compete.com  awesome awesome site)

Championships will do that ... great for business.

[Chief]

that's pretty impressive stuff, this place keeps growing and growing

(graph thanks to compete.com  awesome awesome site)

Championships will do that ... great for business.

Oh, I thought it was all my witty posts.

[cdif911]

that's pretty impressive stuff, this place keeps growing and growing

(graph thanks to compete.com  awesome awesome site)

Championships will do that ... great for business.

an interesting thing though, is that its only up 20% for the month - the big bump was really the KG trade, then a steady incline during the playoffs...

[CelticsGlory]

Going to start dropping down though around next month

[Bahku]

that's pretty impressive stuff, this place keeps growing and growing

(graph thanks to compete.com  awesome awesome site)

Championships will do that ... great for business.

an interesting thing though, is that its only up 20% for the month - the big bump was really the KG trade, then a steady incline during the playoffs...

Yup ... I love the spike in February and the drop at the first part of March ... which coincides with certain injuries and returns ... pretty interesting.  TP for the effort!

[Bob Day]

Actually guys, those Compete numbers are way off. Don't believe everything you read over there. Compete.com is notorious for that as are most of the tracking sites. They do have a disclaimer about it. Basically, their numbers are just SWAG. There are only a few that with numbers that are somewhat trustworthy and tracking for those are generally embedded into websites.

In our case, we have three stats sources we use to try to get a picture of what is going on on CB. Even the numbers on those are lower than actual due to some forced browser-caching schemes I employ from time to time. When I do that, which is usually during high traffic periods, our actual site traffic can range anywhere from 30% to 60% higher than what is tracked.

As for some more realistic numbers that come through our server itself, I can tell you for instance that for this month we've already had way over 100,000 unique visitors that have visited CB right at four times each or more during this month to date. Those folks have visited around 13 to 15 pages per visit and racked up a total of right at 5,000,000 unique page views adding up to over 36,000,000 hits which have used over 236 gigabytes of bandwidth to date for the month so far and is roughly equivalent to what we saw last June.

BTW, these numbers don't have anything to do with either chatroom user activity or traffic or live CSL, Celtic Pride or CSN listenership. I haven't looked into how much bandwidth is used by all those things. I'm sure the number would be quite large.

May through August of 2007 was our busiest period ever. This past May and this current June are more inline with what we saw last year. Otherwise and interesting thing happened on CB and also with other Celtics Blogs. Our traffic and activity dropped in September of 2007 and stayed lower than was anticipated all through the season and at points was even lower than it had been the previous year. This past March was especially dismal. Seems peculiar doesn't it?

In retrospect, I think there were a number of factors for our activity drop off here this past season. It wasn't all, as some have speculated, that we didn't have anything to complain about any more. Nor was it because we all didn't exactly know how to enjoy having a good team as has also been mentioned. Personally, I think the biggest reason though was because EVERYBODY was covering and broadcasting one thing or another related to the C's this past season.

That was dramatically different from the 2006-2007 season when practically nobody was covering the C's on more than the rare occasion if at all except for New England newspapers and TV, and probably more importantly, the many wonderful Celtics blogs around. The previous season everyone was hanging out on the blogs. There wasn't much else going on. This past season we found ourselves competing with Hi-Def and media saturation.

The success of the Celtics hurting the business of the websites of their staunchest supporters makes for an interesting case study. No hard feelings though. They did what we wanted them to do and we couldn't be more proud of them for it. Besides, things are getting back to normal now, C's fans have learned how it feels to be winners again and they have all the rest of Summer to find some new things, as well as rediscover some old things, to gripe about.

LOL!

[SShoreFan 2.0]

May through August of 2007 was our busiest period ever. This past May and this current June are more inline with what we saw last year. Otherwise and interesting thing happened on CB and also with other Celtics Blogs. Our traffic and activity dropped in September of 2007 and stayed lower than was anticipated all through the season and at points was even lower than it had been the previous year. This past March was especially dismal. Seems peculiar doesn't it?

In retrospect, I think there were a number of factors for our activity drop off here this past season. It wasn't all, as some have speculated, that we didn't have anything to complain about any more. Nor was it because we all didn't exactly know how to enjoy having a good team as has also been mentioned. Personally, I think the biggest reason though was because EVERYBODY was covering and broadcasting one thing or another related to the C's this past season.

That was dramatically different from the 2006-2007 season when practically nobody was covering the C's on more than the rare occasion if at all except for New England newspapers and TV, and probably more importantly, the many wonderful Celtics blogs around. The previous season everyone was hanging out on the blogs. There wasn't much else going on. This past season we found ourselves competing with Hi-Def and media saturation.

The success of the Celtics hurting the business of the websites of their staunchest supporters makes for an interesting case study. No hard feelings though. They did what we wanted them to do and we couldn't be more proud of them for it. Besides, things are getting back to normal now, C's fans have learned how it feels to be winners again and they have all the rest of Summer to find some new things, as well as rediscover some old things, to gripe about.

LOL!

I think if you got the folks at the call in based sports stations you would see the same thing.  Misery drives people to the phones and key boards.  I bet the site got more visits towards the tail ends of rounds 1 & 2 than it did in round 3. 

I am sure if you get a chance to talk w/ Danny & Wyc and tell them you need an event every 3 weeks to keep the activity level high they would help out!!

[TripleOT]

God bless everyone at Celticsblog, and all the unique visitors that come here every day. 

[cdif911]

Actually guys, those Compete numbers are way off. Don't believe everything you read over there. Compete.com is notorious for that as are most of the tracking sites. They do have a disclaimer about it. Basically, their numbers are just SWAG. There are only a few that with numbers that are somewhat trustworthy and tracking for those are generally embedded into websites.

Not sure what SWAG means?  I actually have a neighbor who works for them, who I'm sure would have a different opinion than you.

is this the disclaimer you're talking about:

"Compete estimates site traffic and engagement metrics based on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users. Compete applies a rigorous normalization methodology, leveraging scientific multi-dimensional scaling (by age, income, gender and geography) to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population. Compete members are recruited through multiple sources, including ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and additional opt-in panels to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources."

it seems like they have a pretty scientific method for measuring unique hits, while I think you are looking at something else (hits with longevity almost) so perhaps both sets of data are accurate in their own ways?  - I also couldn't find any criticism about the site from a quick search...

[Bob Day]

Actually guys, those Compete numbers are way off. Don't believe everything you read over there. Compete.com is notorious for that as are most of the tracking sites. They do have a disclaimer about it. Basically, their numbers are just SWAG. There are only a few that with numbers that are somewhat trustworthy and tracking for those are generally embedded into websites.

Not sure what SWAG means?  I actually have a neighbor who works for them, who I'm sure would have a different opinion than you.

is this the disclaimer you're talking about:

"Compete estimates site traffic and engagement metrics based on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users. Compete applies a rigorous normalization methodology, leveraging scientific multi-dimensional scaling (by age, income, gender and geography) to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population. Compete members are recruited through multiple sources, including ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and additional opt-in panels to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources."

it seems like they have a pretty scientific method for measuring unique hits, while I think you are looking at something else (hits with longevity almost) so perhaps both sets of data are accurate in their own ways?  - I also couldn't find any criticism about the site from a quick search...

SWAG stands for "Scientific Wild-***ed Guess. And no, that's not the disclaimer. That's their method description. Different organizations use different methods. Compete states somewhere, as do most of the others, that ultimately their results are biased by humans who are making guesses about certain things with the websites they track.

The very simple fact of the matter is that I'm not going to trust any stats that depict less than 20% of the visitors, traffic and activity levels of this site and produce a one year chart results so dissimilar to what other, more accurate sources generate. That's not even to mention how inaccurate their other stats are with regard to CelticsBlog.

Personally I think that while their methods may sound good -- actually the description sounds more like something off the cover page of an undergraduate term paper -- they are lacking especially in regard to better overall tracking, what models they use and how they apply them, and also their guesswork approach. In those areas they could use more direct site involvement. It's about realtime tracking and real analysis based on firsthand information, not speculation and it is certainly not comparative analysis, curves, averages and rounding based on faulty assumptive models and plain old guesswork.

What you get when you employ those methods are results that vary wildly from tracker to tracker. You don't have to take my word for it. Go look at how different Compete's results are from Alexa's, Yahoo's, AdBrite's and on down the line. They all differ from one another and none are as detailed or halfway as accurate as the server a website resides on is capable of producing or even external trackers that are embedded into a site like this. Some use some of the same methods Compete uses as well as others that differ the same as some of Compete's do. None of them agree and none of them are all that accurate. The only common denominator they have is that they are all trying to push on people some method of stats gathering and analysis.

I apologize if you are offended, but these are my opinions and I'll stick to them. They are based on my experience working with other experts in this field for some fourteen years now. I don't mean to offend your friend either but the fact of the matter is, good webmasters who employ top-level statisticians and software always know more about what is going on, on their websites, than outsiders do. In this case, those 18,000 to 19,000 unique visitors a month numbers are just way too wrong as are other stats Compete produces for CB.

[Bob Day]

Just for an update on this, here's some numbers from June. These stats don't take caching mechanisms I employ into consideration that reduce our traffic counts by some percentage. They can be considered minimum numbers. They also do not take into consideration live CSL webcasting or chatroom traffic although CSL show playbacks do account for a notable portion of our CB traffic. Note that with CelticsBlog version 5 I hope to introduce a very accurate method of counting hits on CSL playbacks.

The trend is that CB visitation is healthy and growing. July and August are expected to be quite busy after which we will most likely see some drop off for September and October. However, when the 2008-2009 season begins though, we do expect to see traffic pick back up and continue throughout the year at higher rates than the season that has just concluded even though we will once again be competing with large media outlets and no small portion of media saturation. All in all, CelticsBlog looks very good for the coming year. I am anticipating our monthly unique visitors to range between 75 and 150 thousand although it may be up or down.

Considerations
I am not including all CelticsBlog stats here. There's no year past, year to date or even much in the way of monthly detail tables here much less demographic info. What I am providing is a snapshot of one month that includes a couple of tables of details in case anyone wants to put a pencil to what I'm providing. The point is, we don't sit around and pull this stuff out of our hats. It is based on measurement that is as rock solid as it gets -- except that the numbers are lower due to the aforementioned caching devices I employ to reduce server load here.

Q: What's the deal with caching?
A: Lots of high-traffic sites use various caching methods to optimize their server and bandwidth resources and lots of people scream about it because, particularly the better caching methods, usually throw statistical numbers off. The thing is though, it throws the numbers down, not up. It is then no wonder that most of the screaming you hear about how caching depresses site traffic numbers comes from site owners. If I ever had to tell a website owner we needed to implement something that would skew the site numbers WAY UP, I have no doubt I would find plenty of sympathy and agreement.

Q: How much does the caching we use throw CB numbers off?
A: I don't know and nobody does. It varies due to a number of elements I won't go into here but can vary from 15% to 60% with probably 30% to 40% being average where forced browser caching is heavily employed.

Q: What is forced browser-caching?
A: That is when we ask your web browser to store data that it may or may not be configured or wish to store. If the browser says "No!", we try to make it store it anyway. We're pretty good at it too, but it is harmless thing not nearly so bad as it sounds. It helped us stay online during the playoffs and Draft Night. Think of it as a much more benevolent form of Stephen King's "Smokers Anonymous." It's good for you. You'll like it.

Ultimately, the only thing relevant to this thread we all need to know is simply that when we employ caching heavily here, it simply makes a lot of people seem to disappear to stat-collecting software -- lots of them...into the thin virtual air -- and that's the part that drives webstats people nuts.

Last note for now
I apologize for the format of the tables below, but I simply didn't have the time to lay them all out by hand in proper tables via BBCode (what the forums use). The truth be known, I could have yanked them all from HTML and search/replaced all of the important tags in a few minutes, but I was not even feeling that industrious (which is pretty lazy). So it reads, but not pretty.

Now on to the June numbers...
June 2008
Unique visitors: 117,166
Number of visits: 453,621 (3.87 visits/visitor)
Pages: 5,819,193 (12.82 Pages/Visit)
Hits: 42,173,228 (92.97 Hits/Visit)
Bandwidth: 283.95 GB (656.36 KB/Visit)

June's dailies looked like this...
Day    Number of visits    Pages    Hits    Bandwidth
01 Jun 2008    14185    156142    1289508    8.75 GB
02 Jun 2008    14272    176545    1382749    21.50 GB
03 Jun 2008    14282    176319    1296364    8.15 GB
04 Jun 2008    13601    171587    1219680    5.32 GB
05 Jun 2008    14742    185604    1428927    5.53 GB
06 Jun 2008    16554    223150    1602127    8.47 GB
07 Jun 2008    11062    113704    888521    11.52 GB
08 Jun 2008    13178    143046    1200660    5.42 GB
09 Jun 2008    16963    230911    1562412    9.21 GB
10 Jun 2008    15183    204286    1514765    5.62 GB
11 Jun 2008    14567    188773    1237910    10.25 GB
12 Jun 2008    14824    217224    1600968    6.01 GB
13 Jun 2008    18205    260702    1729412    19.91 GB
14 Jun 2008    12202    132741    1009898    7.50 GB
15 Jun 2008    14202    181243    1385604    6.60 GB
16 Jun 2008    17555    223315    1506987    11.80 GB
17 Jun 2008    19635    253219    1868561    7.42 GB
18 Jun 2008    25612    372215    2516330    11.65 GB
19 Jun 2008    17410    220098    1566561    8.21 GB
20 Jun 2008    14271    188177    1284343    12.83 GB
21 Jun 2008    11003    115936    918721    6.24 GB
22 Jun 2008    11630    126679    988872    8.13 GB
23 Jun 2008    14877    202027    1397554    15.56 GB
24 Jun 2008    14766    194500    1309108    7.71 GB
25 Jun 2008    14803    188064    1313259    6.71 GB
26 Jun 2008    17197    282622    2151323    6.66 GB
27 Jun 2008    17470    275352    1713610    24.80 GB
28 Jun 2008    11578    106173    929274    5.34 GB
29 Jun 2008    12557    124318    1026307    5.52 GB
30 Jun 2008    15235    184521    1332913    5.60 GB
Average    15120.70    193973.10    1405774.27    9.46 GB
Total    453621    5819193    42173228    283.95 GB

Our traffic comes from (and this is always my favorite part) around 130 countries on average...
Countries    Pages    Hits    Bandwidth
United States    us    5275960    38557515    255.18 GB
Unknown    ip    228442    1396072    9.46 GB
Australia    au    54145    462995    5.48 GB
Canada    ca    43511    338978    2.88 GB
Singapore    sg    22186    101783    257.23 MB
European country    eu    17495    143949    1.47 GB
Hong Kong    hk    14433    105866    1.01 GB
Germany    de    14124    90473    634.71 MB
Argentina    ar    13009    16093    123.76 MB
Great Britain    gb    12449    93557    620.95 MB
South Korea    kr    10772    49279    251.03 MB
Spain    es    10256    98082    761.31 MB
Switzerland    ch    10062    31241    141.73 MB
Belgium    be    9848    43293    104.28 MB
Philippines    ph    8886    65520    638.29 MB
Puerto Rico    pr    8335    77831    130.16 MB
Italy    it    7960    51997    242.02 MB
Israel    il    7857    29590    746.31 MB
Taiwan    tw    4102    44910    520.55 MB
Netherlands    nl    3450    26811    300.74 MB
China    cn    3366    29332    379.24 MB
Portugal    pt    3305    43438    324.65 MB
France    fr    3093    25710    104.04 MB
Bahamas    bs    2476    16477    187.69 MB
El Salvador    sv    2448    18949    154.83 MB
Japan    jp    2370    24542    383.05 MB
Greece    gr    2159    10344    47.74 MB
United Arab Emirates    ae    2038    9119    193.47 MB
New Zealand    nz    1964    16800    68.18 MB
Turkey    tr    1694    17205    177.81 MB
Brazil    br    1651    19438    91.01 MB
Costa Rica    cr    1299    8409    59.27 MB
Hungary    hu    1079    6511    66.83 MB
Barbados    bb    950    5065    13.15 MB
Poland    pl    762    7469    26.16 MB
India    in    757    7380    24.22 MB
Austria    at    747    3985    36.84 MB
Thailand    th    728    7672    204.44 MB
Norway    no    714    6902    118.99 MB
Iceland    is    606    6893    26.19 MB
Indonesia    id    549    3454    21.68 MB
Czech Republic    cz    499    4362    165.99 MB
Sweden    se    482    4010    24.44 MB
Latvia    lv    439    519    19.07 MB
Ireland    ie    412    3004    46.87 MB
Vietnam    vn    412    513    23.81 MB
Bosnia-Herzegovina    ba    391    1624    3.95 MB
Mexico    mx    360    2971    11.33 MB
Romania    ro    339    1692    10.66 MB
South Africa    za    319    1479    12.18 MB
Kuwait    kw    287    2713    13.02 MB
Denmark    dk    264    3675    14.72 MB
Finland    fi    240    3467    14.26 MB
Bulgaria    bg    225    374    3.71 MB
Ukraine    ua    205    504    10.31 MB
Slovenia    si    186    1065    8.65 MB
Russian Federation    ru    182    724    10.04 MB
Saudi Arabia    sa    162    901    5.43 MB
Yugoslavia    yu    145    2349    7.90 MB
Croatia    hr    127    951    3.67 MB
Bermuda    bm    119    1868    3.53 MB
Antigua and Barbuda    ag    110    807    5.41 MB
Estonia    ee    96    377    3.09 MB
Venezuela    ve    91    1127    5.47 MB
Dominican Republic    do    89    990    5.37 MB
Colombia    co    75    1004    5.51 MB
Egypt    eg    54    332    3.30 MB
Lebanon    lb    51    565    2.66 MB
Chile    cl    51    365    2.88 MB
Moldova    md    48    53    915.74 KB
Slovak Republic    sk    47    404    2.22 MB
Lithuania    lt    47    385    1.41 MB
Malaysia    my    35    311    2.15 MB
Panama    pa    35    383    2.04 MB
Trinidad and Tobago    tt    35    305    1.37 MB
Cambodia    kh    34    397    1.02 MB
Bahrain    bh    28    420    2.08 MB
Dominica    dm    27    404    1.60 MB
Saint Kitts & Nevis Anguilla    kn    26    267    940.50 KB
Cayman Islands    ky    21    505    1.70 MB
Cameroon    cm    21    259    1.96 MB
Ecuador    ec    21    156    649.60 KB
Luxembourg    lu    19    466    1.69 MB
Malta    mt    18    60    1.10 MB
Guatemala    gt    18    249    1008.22 KB
Mongolia    mn    18    322    1.19 MB
Bhutan    bt    16    107    383.51 KB
Nigeria    ng    14    14    1.29 MB
Iran    ir    14    172    1.07 MB
Nicaragua    ni    14    85    618.62 KB
Peru    pe    14    239    1.07 MB
Macedonia    mk    14    92    769.19 KB
Paraguay    py    12    162    496.90 KB
Tunisia    tn    10    10    749.68 KB
Azerbaidjan    az    10    78    285.10 KB
Belarus    by    9    56    326.62 KB
Albania    al    9    205    638.52 KB
Guam (USA)    gu    9    92    441.41 KB
Guinea Bissau    gw    9    113    375.14 KB
Jamaica    jm    8    61    216.21 KB
Kyrgyzstan    kg    8    112    483.00 KB
Kenya    ke    7    12    158.14 KB
Fiji    fj    7    210    925.82 KB
Kazakhstan    kz    6    9    501.74 KB
Pakistan    pk    6    90    463.55 KB
Mozambique    mz    6    17    311.17 KB
Maldives    mv    5    158    474.15 KB
Namibia    na    5    5    300.94 KB
Jordan    jo    4    86    390.89 KB
Nepal    np    4    19    326.71 KB
Cyprus    cy    3    83    505.54 KB
Senegal    sn    3    79    411.70 KB
Ethiopia    et    3    3    42.62 KB
Brunei Darussalam    bn    3    89    467.84 KB
Honduras    hn    2    8    163.77 KB
Cook Islands    ck    2    2    57.41 KB
Gambia    gm    2    2    37.67 KB
Micronesia    fm    2    79    43.06 KB
Zimbabwe    zw    2    7    131.51 KB
Burkina Faso    bf    1    1    56.08 KB
Oman    om    1    1    15.72 KB
Tanzania    tz    1    1    33.22 KB
North Korea    kp    1    1    141 Bytes
Bangladesh    bd    1   2    45.81 KB
Myanmar    mm    1   1    12.37 KB
Uganda            ug    1   2    52.67 KB
Macau            mo    1   18    88.29 KB
Ghana            gh    1   36    178.67 KB
Algeria    dz    1   1    74.78 KB
Faroe Islands    fo    1   1    52.67 KB

Other notes
Our traffic is fairly constant around the clock. Our busiest period runs from 7AM to midnight EST with our slowest period between 2AM and 5AM EST. What that tells us is that lots of people start visiting CB as soon as they get up, check with us throughout the day and continue to do it until bedtime. On average people visit us for 11 minutes per visit (outstanding) with over 15% spending an hour or more. On average our total number of site visitors outnumber our active registered members by a factor of around 20:1. Those unregistered members include practically everyone who is related to the NBA in one way or another.

I hope you folks enjoy these tidbits. Some community, huh?

[Donoghus]

Thanks, Bob.

Looks like the night of/morning following Game 6 and draft night were huge hits-wise.