Celebrating 1 Million Page Views!
TweetThis blog has not exactly had a spectacular run. We have had the occasional links from Desipundit and a few Carnivals, but that is about it. Last November, we had completed 3 years and 5 months of existence and the total page view count was 92,443 (from Sitemeter stats for 2.5 years. the first year we didn’t measure the stats). Last November we switched to wordpress and at that time, we had 450 posts and 850 comments.
As i have said before, i stopped checking the stats long ago. A few days back, i had to pay Pressharbor the hosting fees for the next year and I decided to check the stats just for the heck of it.
For the period Dec 1, 2007 till date, the blog had received 1,089,829 pageviews ! I couldn’t contain my excitement when i saw that. Wow! After drilling down to the monthly stats, I calculated the page views generated by the key crawlers – Googlebot, Yahoobot, Cuill and others to be approximately 7.5%. If you look at the net page views excluding crawler page views, the page views stands at 1,010,299 !
We now have 520 posts including this one and a whopping 3,842 comments – 3,000 of which were logged in the last 12 months. During that time, we did 10 times the page views of the past 3.5 years combined.
Observations
1. Overall traffic from search engines is now less than 5% of the total traffic. It was exactly the other way around before this blog moved to WordPress. This means most of the traffic is coming from regular readers.
2. The addition of new authors and the sheer variety and quality of their posts – Priya Raju, Dr. Abdul Fakhri, Sujatha Manivasagam, NK Sreedhar and most recently Sultana Fakhri, seems to have increased the subscriber base of this blog dramatically.
3. Every month, a portion of visits comes via Google using the keywords -“Sukumar Rajagopal”, “Priya Raju” and “Sastwingees”. I deduce that these are regular readers but use the search engine to come to this blog. My recommendation to these readers is to use a feed reader. I wrote a post a while ago on how my productivity improved when i started using the Bloglines Feed Reader . You may want to go through that. I now have switched to Google Reader which i think is much better than Bloglines.
Thank You
A celebration is never complete without thank yous. First a big thank you to the readers for reading and commenting and making it worthwhile for the authors of this blog.
Special thank you to regular commenters – Senthil, Archana Raghuram, PK Karthik, Subba Muthurangan, Vamsi Poondla, Saraswathi, Jaskirat, Ananth and many others.
Special thank you to Ganesh, my comrade-in-arms who has been with SAST Wingees since Day 1.
Special thank you to Priya Raju, Sibu Kutty, Sujatha Manivasagam, NK Sreedhar, Dr. Abdul Fakhri and Sultana Fakhri – the quality of your posts is what is driving the traffic to this blog. Keep up the great work.
Go SAST Wingees!
Survey
This is to the readers who typically don’t comment – Are there topics you would like us to cover? If you can leave that as a comment, we can try to get those covered.
If you are passionate about writing on topics and you would like to be a contributor, please let us know. We welcome new contributors who can expand our vistas.
Sukumar – I’m pleased to see these statistics. Variety does seem to matter, doesn’t it? It pulls in different kinds of readers to our blog.
My request to readers – Some of you either tweet or email the authors with your comments. Actually, we’d love to see those points as comments. Every comment has the potential to open up a lively discussion. That helps all of us to know more about the topic. Plus, it keeps the proceedings interesting.
Thanks Priya. I agree, it will be great if people can comment directly on the blog, so that others in the community can interact with their comments as well. If people are worried about identity etc, they can always post an anonymous comment.
Congratulation !!
Sukumar,
Congratulations! Indeed a great milestone. Thanks to you and Priya for variety of wonderful posts.
– Ramesh
Thank you for this blog Sukumar. Two key differentiators of this blog I observed are 1) variety 2) depth 3) passionate community.
1) Variety – The topics and series are very interesting and some are very contemporary
2) Depth – Most of the posts appear to be coming from deep research. If reading and understanding them takes so much time for my puny brain, I wonder how much time would be spent to carefully research, bookmark various data points and present it as a post. That is quality publishing.
3) Passion – I observed that all contributors do blog about what is passionate for them. I did blog many a time as a reactionary blog post for some event/ incident that pissed me off or made me angry.
I the blogosphere, we see 1000s blogging about gadget releases, product releases (like Google Chrome) etc. Such routine news, specs-publishing-posts will not enter this blog. This is what I liked most about this place.
http://www.sastwingees.org is a kind of ‘adda’ (Bengali – meeting place) for me and many of us.
Thanks for all your efforts.
Congrats to you all at SastWingees ! It’s indeed celebration time.
Wishing you all the very best in the days to come !!!
Terrific. Just shows that if you have contributors who care about what they write, slow and steady wins the race.
Congrats to the Sastwingees team!! It is wonderful to see the statistics. Kudos to each and every member.
Vamsi has rightly pointed out in his comment the reasons which I agree because I visit the blog because there is passion, in-depth research and variety in topics.
I have very limited knowledge of most of the topics discussed and it helps me gain interest in those topics by reading the posts. So it does take me time to read and understand each post. The language and the emotions expressed in each blog post is excellent!!
Sukumar and Priya and team,
Congrats and well deserve one. You guys are putting so much effect to keep this blog up and running, i mean regular variety of posts, lively follow-up discussions and patiently answering each individuals opinion and questions. I can give A++++++++++++++ to your blog and posts. Keep it up and this blog will reach 10 million hits very soon.
Thanks
Subba
Hi Priya and Sukumar,
Congrats! This has been a great site with so much of variety and depth. Great job on keeping it going and the results show for sure.
May be the one thing that I have constantly observed is that most of the comments in this blog are supportive of the topic that is being discussed. I havent seen many arguments that have taken an opposing position convincingly. Even the few who have had opposing positions have waged weak arguments and have fallen off wayside pretty soon. You can look at it in different ways, but I think that is a testament to the amount of research that goes into each topic that is being presented.
Great going…
Sundara.
Congrats Guys!!! what a milestone!….Awesome we are looking forward for the 10 million soon.
I have really learnt a lot from this site and its awesome!!!.Thanks a lot guys…keep up ur good work
Sukumar,
Congratulations!!! And a big THANKS for maintaining this site and motivating me at various times.
I have certainly learnt a lot from various posts on this site. I am happy to see this blog providing a forum for various folks and the number of posters and commenters growing.
Ganesh
Congrats !! Thats some milestone ! Way to go SAST Wingees ! 🙂
I second your choice of Google reader , although i feel it could still be improved from a usability perspective, the biggest plus points are availability , accessibility apart from the unarguably best in portability of your feed list.
Congratulations!!! Sukumar & team, I have learnt so…. much from this blog. A Big Thank You to all the contributors and the commenters. I am definitely one of the guilty ones who visit this blog(& use the Google search to do so:-)), but very rarely comment. I don’t know if it is because, I am always at least a couple of posts behind and the discussions for the that particular post have already ended or that I just don’t have an opinion on some topics!!!. But this is no excuse for not saying a thank you or appreciating the efforts of the contributors.
Thank you all again for enlightening us with all these varied and well researched posts.
-Hema
Big congrats to all the authors of this blog.
Before visiting this blog I used to read the posts in the blog and leave, this is where i first saw that it is a converstation, the disucssion even more interesting than the posts.
The first post I read was ‘Can Passion be taught’ which I liked very much and I subscribed to this blog. All the posts are superb.
As Vamsi said, the passion, the reasearch that goes into each post is awesome….
All the best.. 🙂
Congratulations Priya, Sukumar and all the others!! 🙂
Being a reader of Sastwingees has been a very enriching experience!!
Way to go!! 🙂
congrats priya
Aargh. All the comments that i wrote got deleted because pressharbor had to rollback to the backup. Too bad. Here i go again.
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Somsuj, Ramesh and Vamsi, thanks a lot. Vamsi, as a certified bonglophile, i loved your “adda” designation to this blog.
Ranjit, Rachel, Saraswathi, Subba, thanks a lot for your kind words and your support to this blog community by way of your shared wisdom.
Sundara,
thanks. BTW, there are several authors on this blog, so the credit goes to all of us authors.
That is a good observation. Ganesh pointed out a few days ago, that we may be overzealously defending our points. We have taken that feedback. Aside from that we also need to figure out some way of getting opposing points of view.
karthik, thanks a lot.
Ganesh,
thanks a lot for your contributions. You have stuck with this blog even when it was not as well conceptualized. Your encouragement and contributions have made a huge difference to the existence of this blog.
Jass,
Thanks a lot. You are right Google Reader needs improvement, but at this time i don’t think there is a better reader than that one.
Hema,
Thanks. I think you will benefit from using Google Reader. Since we provide a full feed, you can read the entire post from within the reader. That way you don’t have to keep checking the blog again and again and because we don’t maintain a fixed publishing schedule, you won’t miss posts. Please do consider participating in the discussions. You are one of the best Lateral Thinkers i know. I am sure you can contribute a lot to the discussions if you put your mind to it.
Ananth, Revathi and Sagari, thanks a lot for your kind words.
Thanks for your complement sukumar, (inspite of me taking the opposite stand most of the times..)
The writing style and depth of content, is some thing that attracts the user..
Great job and congratulations! I agree with Vamsi in that the topics are interesting and that makes everyone associate themselves with the topic. I have a couple of suggestions:
1. I used to read “The Hindu” and “Indian Express” growing up and I think one of them used to carry a “Know your English” every Tuesday. Why don’t we do a light-hearted post every week on a particular day. This will make people come back on specific days to the blog post – the occasional readers can be brought to the site more often. It could be a joke, a hoax, a puzzle or anything that’s light for the quick visitor.
2. We could have a post on Friday / Saturday / Sunday as the weekend generates more traffic and a hot-off-the-press post will generate more comments if it were posted on these days.
With the following that the site currently has, it shouldn’t take long to reach 10MM hits. I predict that would happen within 24 months 🙂
Thanks Senthil.
NK,
Thanks. those are great ideas. Anyone wants to volunteer for these topics?
10MM hits in 24 months – that would be cool.
Congratulations to all the authors of this blog. I cannot explain in words how much I have learned by reading the various articles. All of them are well researched and the diversity in topics makes it much more interesting.
Thanks for your kind words Harish.
Sukumar, Thanks for the kind & encouraging words. Google Reader it is!!
-Hema
You are welcome Hema. Look forward to your comments.