3000 and counting....

• Posted by Paul October 2, 2012 - 746 views

  

  Let's crack open a barrel of the best Black Briar Mead - because The Skyrim Blog has just reached the milestone of having 3000 members.

  The milestone was reached today, almost one year into our existence as a membership site on the Ning Network. And to think how much agonised on the old site about whether anyone would want to 'sign up' to a members site!

  I thought I'd take the opportunity to share a few of the current metrics that I can see via the fact that I installed the Google Analytics code onto the back in January.

  Total Visitors during 2012   1,055,291

  Total Page Views during 2012    4,648,554

  Visitors in last month  154,619

  Visitors in last 24 hours  11,968

  Average time spent on site by visitors  7 minutes 11 seconds

  Top nationality among visitors : USA (64.1%)

  Top browser among visitors : Chrome (35.4%) 

  What is clear from these figures is that The Skyrim Blog - whilst hardly likely to rival Microsoft or Apple, or even the Official Bethesda site - has carved out a significant niche for itself on the Web. In fact, the daily visitor figures have hardly altered over the last six months. There was a brief upwards surge when Dawnguard came out, but otherwise it has remained remarkably steady as around 12K per day.

  Typically around 30% of visitors in a typical week are 'first time visitors' which no doubt helps to explain the steady trickle of new members. It shows that there's plenty of life left in Skyrim - otherwise why would people be searching around on Google for Skyrim sites?

  I guess the next challenge is not only to continue to welcome new members, but also to try and engage them. Whilst its always good to see new people getting stuck into posting stuff, there are a large number who take the (not inconsiderable) trouble to go through all the sign up hoops, only to never post anything at all on the site. Given that everything can be viewed by non-members, that seems a little odd...

  Over coming weeks I want to try to get more of the 3000 members to actually participate. Ideas would be welcome! Would sending out 'welcome emails' help? Are there new features that would help?

  Meanwhile I think all of us here on the site can bask in the achievement of getting to the 3000 - and toast it with that frothy Nordic mead!