A long time ago, possibly last year, I promised to round up some statistics about the site, such as the number of visitors. Sorry it’s taken so long, but here it finally is. As a point of comparison, here’s the first and possibly last time I wrote about this stuff.

Entries and annotations

The Diary section of the site currently has 2,053 entries (not all of them published yet) and 41,466 annotations (this figure doesn’t include spam annotations), so that’s an average of about 20 annotations per diary entry. Here’s a graph from Movable Type showing the number of annotations on diary entries over the past four months:

Graph showing recent annotations on the Diary

The Encyclopedia section features 3,049 topics (again, not all published), 1,724 of them people, and 6,791 annotations. Here’s the annotations graph for the Encyclopedia:

Graph showing recent annotations on the Encyclopedia

The In-Depth Articles and the Site News sections of the site have received 180 and 919 comments respectively making for a grand total of 49,356 across the whole site.

Every link from a Diary entry to an Encyclopedia topic creates a reference back to the Diary entry and there have been 30,581 of these to date.

Visitors, page views, etc.

According to Google Analytics, over the past month (29th June to 28th July) the site has had 25,378 Absolute Unique Visitors (ie, different people) visiting a total of 54,240 times for a total of 132,465 Pageviews.

Here are some graphs of daily statistics from May 2007, the earliest I have Google Analytics data for (click to see larger versions).

Visits:
Visits graph

Pageviews:
Pageviews graph

Average time on site:
Average time on site graph

And here’s a map indicating where Visits come from:
Map of visits

And data for the top 25 countries (according to number of Visits):
Table of visits by country

For those interested in such things, here’s a breakdown of which web browsers and operating systems are most popular here:
Chart of web browsers

This is an indication of where traffic comes from:
Table of visits by country
(“Direct Traffic” is people who have bookmarked the site or type the URL in; “Search engines” is visits that came from someone searching on Google etc; and “Referring Sites” is visits that occurred by someone following a link from any other site to get here.)

Here are the top 25 things people searched for on search engines to get here (numbers in brackets are the number of visits for that search term over the past month):

  1. pepys (1,163)
  2. pepys diary (1,129)
  3. samuel pepys (647)
  4. diary (514)
  5. samuel pepys diary (277)
  6. pepysdiary (196)
  7. trinity monday (168)
  8. pepys diary online (165)
  9. louise de queroelle (144)
  10. whitehall palace (135)
  11. “buttered ale” (121)
  12. burgundy wine london 17th century (110)
  13. pepysdiary.com (95)
  14. elizabeth pepys (93)
  15. www.pepysdiary.com (84)
  16. lady castlemaine (77)
  17. samuel pypes (69)
  18. diary of samuel pepys (68)
  19. samuel pepys sex (63)
  20. samuel pepys diaries (56)
  21. “william penn” pepys shitten (55)
  22. the diary of samuel pepys (55)
  23. nicolas barbon (53)
  24. “cum salis grano” (48)
  25. plague pepys (47)

RSS feeds and email

Finally, a summary of how many people read the site via RSS or email (possibly in addition to on the web). The main Diary feed has 2,461 subscribers, the Story So Far feed has 106 subscribers, the Encyclopedia 60 subscribers, Site News 72 and In-Depth Articles 59.

Here’s a graph showing the number of subscribers to the Diary feed since I started using FeedBurner to host the feeds in October 2007:
Graph of subscribers to the Diary feed

This is a break-down of how subscribers to the Diary feed have been reading it over the past month:
Chart of subscribers to the Diary feed

There are currently 131 people receiving daily Diary entries via email.

If there are any statistics you’d like to know which I’ve left out, do ask below and if they’re available I’ll update the post.



11 Comments

First Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

Phil,

Amazing! Astonishing! Very impressive -- not only the use of the site, but that these data can be known!!

Kudos for what you've wrought!

John Mertz  •  Link

Looks like a peak around Christmas--People looking up holiday recipes, or trying out new computers?

Cheers!

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Wonder what the difference is between "samuel pepys" number 3, and "samuel pepys" number 17.

Also, I'll bet the people who came here looking for the meaning of "cum salis grano" were surprised.

dirk  •  Link

#19 goes to show Sam's reputation still in the 21st century! And what to think of #21 ?

Phil Gyford  •  Link

John: Actually there's a gradual dip around Christmas, which is understandable as people go away. Then a big peak on January 6th - maybe the site had some press then, or it was when people came back from holiday and wanted to catch up.

Paul: My mistake, the Number 17 "samuel pepys" should have been "samuel pypes", which I've now corrected.

Bradford  •  Link

They come to read that year's Twelfth Night entry, January 5---which is where I hopped on, soon after the start, in---what was it? 2003? A fabulous array of data, Phil, sure to fuel sociological extrapolations! Merci mille fois.

vivian pitney  •  Link

I am sooo impressed. I have read this from the getgo & always felt very singular. But not now, I am speechless/wordless with these statistics!!

language hat  •  Link

Interesting that there are so few readers from South Africa; I wonder why?

Pedro  •  Link

And no interest for our Queene from Portugal?

Portugal is on the verge of recognition from Spain of their regained independence, and helped a great deal by the English.

steve aley  •  Link

phil, after reading the diary for the last 6 months and your stats on hits etc, i was wondering what the gender biased was on your absolutes, I surmise from samual's material that it would be biased to males on an 80/20 basis, can your confirm this please.

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Steve, I have no data about gender bias. I always assumed it was around 50/50 give or take 10 per cent or so but I have no evidence one way or another.

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