Tuesday, March 06, 2007

God save the Queen!

Pikesoft.com visitors
I pay very little attention to my traffic stats on Pikesoft.com. Not that I'm not curious, just that setting up my server to track it is far down on a long list of "deferred maintenance" for the site and I never seem to get to it. I do occasionally watch the (imperfect) stats from Alexa, and the last few times I checked I noticed some surprises.

First of all, the number of visitors from the US tends to hover at only about 10%. Some months the Americans are outnumbered by Bulgarian visitors. Is this because for some reason US users tend to install the Alexa toolbar in their browsers less than everyone else, or is it real? The sample size is large enough: I tend to reach about 4 in every 10,000 people who have the Alexa toolbar with each post (roughly 4,400 readers, according to Alexa). And I can't think of a reason that the U.S. would be under-represented except that in fact only about 1 in 10 of you readers are Americans. That, in turn, could say something about where people do the most blog-reading, or it could indicate the level of interest in mobile technology. I'm leaning toward the latter explanation.

But what really gets me is that about two thirds of you people are from the UK or Canada. Overcome by curiosity the other day, I checked the folks who post comments on the PalmInfocenter articles and noticed a similar distribution: a high percentage of Brits, with Americans in a solid minority. This is a little strange to me not just because the UK is quite a bit smaller than the US, but also because my site and certainly PalmInfocenter's have a focus on Palm and Palm OS, which the analysts always tell us are popular in the US, but not so much overseas. I'd be interested in your theories if you have any. Among my mobile-blogging compadres I'd also be curious to know if you see a similar pattern in your viewership.

But for now I just want to say: God save the Queen! :-)

Posted by cervezas at 13:12:18. Filed under: General

Comments

I usually read your site via RSS -- I would guess that us American feed readers just won't show up in your stats the same way.

Posted by bcombee at Tuesday, March 06, 2007 20:06:56

Of course! I should have known it's not that Americans aren't as interested in mobile technology--it's that those technologically backward foreigners haven't discovered RSS readers! ;)

Thanks for putting the bounce back in my sagging American superiority complex!

Posted by cervezas at Wednesday, March 07, 2007 08:01:40

I think the stats from Alexa are seriously skewed, David. My blog probably gets more traffic from outside the US than inside, but the split is more like 60-40.

The big gap in global traffic is that there's not a lot of traffic from places where people don't learn English. No surprise there.

A couple of tracking services that I like are are statcounter and clustrmaps. Plus clustrmaps gives you that cool little "where do the readers come from" map. You can see the one for my weblog <a href="http://clustrmaps.com/count...">here</a>.

Both trackers are very easy to install -- just drop a few lines of code into your blog template.

Posted by Michael Mace at Wednesday, March 07, 2007 11:50:18

It's probably the Carival of the mobilists thing. It smacks of the good ole days of fiefdoms and jesters. Damn brits. =)

I assume Alexa would be flagged as spyware by any respectable security suite, and I wonder if semi-anonymous tracking information is viewed with as much disdain/fear overseas as it is here. The UK has talking cameras on every other street corner.

Posted by mian at Friday, March 09, 2007 15:44:02

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