Message #23

From: David Vanderschel <DvdS@Austin.RR.com>
Subject: Fwd: slashdot web traffc
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2003 20:23:15 -0000

Date: Tue Jun 10, 2003 5:16 pm

— In MC4D@yahoogroups.com, Melinda Green <melinda@s…> wrote:
dear cubists,

* here’s the breakdown of the web traffic due to roice’s slashdot
plug:
* over 300,000 hits from over 85,000 user sessions,
* about 57,000 of which were referred directly from slashdot.org,
* most of the rest probably did too but their browsers didn’t
report
the referring page,
* 30,000 people (35% of user sessions) downloaded the windows
version
of MC4D.
* 3% of those people also downloaded the windows source,
* very few people downloaded other binary or source versions.

this is all very, very cool. it’ll be interesting to see how many of
those 30,000 eventually submit solutions.

i’ve uploaded the webtrends report for the past couple days to
http://www.superliminal.com/cube/slashdot/EXECTV.HTM so you can see
the
exact breakdowns. the most interesting to me is the top downloaded
files
graph:
[Image]
as well as the activity by hour of day graph:
[Image]
remember that this includes roughly a 48 hour span so the graph has
wrapped around so that each hour is the sum of both day’s activity.
i’m
guessing that the slashdot posting occurred around 11 PM on monday and
generated immediate interest by night owls. an equally large spike
occurred around 7 AM pacific time, 9 AM eastern, which further
supports
the idea that people are surfing at work. it also suggests that they
do
most of their surfing in the morning. it also suggests that most of
them
begin work at the normal beginning of the business day which i find
surprising for a group dominated by programmers.

i was surprised to see that the most popular download after cube
content
was my upside-down typing applet at
http://www.superliminal.com/upsidedown/NQAS.htm, further supporting
the
guess that these guys are real nerds!
i was also happy to see that nearly 1,000 people found their way to my
personal home page at http://www.superliminal.com/melinda/ and that
about a third of them browsed my resume.

finally, a few platform related stats:

* IE was by far the dominant browser, Netscape was next, and the
rest
were a tiny sliver,
* most of the major browsers were very current releases,
* nearly 70% of the platforms were Windows NT which i take to mean
largely programmers surfing at work,
* Linux represented only 13% of users which i find surprising
considering slashdot is mostly about Linux.

all in all a nice little 15 hours of fame–or thereabouts. let’s hope
this leads to more continued interest. thanks again roice!
-melinda
— End forwarded message —