T H E W I L D W I L D E A S T D A I L I E S: Who Are You

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Who Are You - and What Da "F" Do You Want?

Well, aren't those the usual questions – but to ask them here is dangerous. Do I really want to know who all the loonies are who read this blog? Of course I do. For those of you who tuned in late, this thing started out in early February as a response to a post by my old ad buddy, Hugh MacLeod. Hugh writes and draws the GapingVoid.com blog and can be found easily in the sidebar here. As it goes, Hugh included a link to my book site (which can also be found in

Data, Google Analytics, Love, StatCounter, Statistics

the sidebar) on his blog back in February and my hits took a steep hike because Hugh's blog is just very heavily read. He's in Technorati's top 1000 blogs worldwide and that's really something. At the end of this post you'll see where we are on that scale and that will give you some real perspective. But anyway, this blog, The Wild Wild East Dailies was created overnight to give readers a little more sound-bite-like stuff to get their teeth around, as opposed to the book site – which is 80 pages or so in one post of a story you may or may not want to read. And so, here we are today, and if I might say so myself, pretty damn healthy for it. It has helped make contact with a ton of old friends again, introduced me to a fine group of new ones, provided a bit of journalistic therapy and believe it or not, attracted a growing, incredibly dedicated, loyal readership – and, I absolutely just love writing it. So who the fuck are you? And why are you here? Those are the questions we're about to answer. Click on the images to make them full-size.

Welcome To the World:

The first thing I want to get a grip on today is a globe – because that what it takes to see who reads this. From Moscow to Seoul, Tokyo, New York, Vancouver, Michigan, Wisconsin, Brazil, India, Australia, Vietnam of course, some crazy rastafarian in Jamaica – I'm seeing hits from everywhere. And since we're now syndicated on Digg and Mixx we get a l

ot of news and feat

ure hits that come from virtually everywhere. One chart you'll see today says 30 countries, but that's just a 30-day snapshot. In reality, the total is a whole lot more than that but I don't have the capability to see everyone from everywhere at one time so we'll just do this little by little. Take a look at the two maps provided. They are snapshots taken roughly two months apart. The highest concentration of readers comes from the US, followed by Vietnam and then trails off to everywhere. The core reader bases seem to be New York and Vietnam with their frequency, loyalty and length of time spent constantly topping the charts.

What Do All These People Want?

You'd think that anybody who checked in and stayed here had at least a modicum of intelligence and a whole lot of better things to do with their time, but let's dig a little deeper into not only who check in here, but what they do when they get here. Look at the chart on the left below. You'll see the columns Country, Visits, Pages per Visit, Average Time on Site, % New Visits and Bounce Rate. Understanding most of that you ask, "What the hell is Bounce Rate?". Well, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who check in and say, "This looks like shit, I'm outa here." – and then leave quickly. Indians and Australians fucking hate me. 100% of both of those countries don't even stay long enough to use the toilet. They have 100% Bounce Rates. But never fear, they're followed closely by the Koreans, English, Americans and Canadians with rates in the 70s and 80s. That means I'm only interesting to 25% of those people, but considering that, aside from the

Koreans, the Anglos represent the largest readership and 25% of those big numbers is pretty good. Now look again and see who has the lowest Bounce Rate. Huh? The Germans, Swiss and Singaporeans? Yep. 50% of them hang out. Now you've got to ask yourself. "What makes this so interesting to them?" I personally, have no idea. The Vietnamese, by the way, stick around for at least 30% of the time. – Now, swing over to the Average Time on Site column. And, oh look! The Canadians piss off the fastest whilst the Swiss, Germans and Vietnamese, spend around 7 minutes a pop here. Amazing! Even the Koreans are good for a three minute gig with the Americans and their short attention spans managing just a bit over two minutes. – Next up, the Pages per Visit column. Here the Viets, Swiss and even the South Koreans share honours with two pages per visit – so we at least know their scrolling fingers work. And those hard to please Americans? Down at a page and a half a pop. The Indians and Aussies couldn't get out the door fast enough after one page.

Who Loves Ya Baby?

Here's where we really start to cut the mustard. After we pitch the Indians and Aussies we're down to the 30% of the people who do stick around, and that's the audience I'm writing for. Whatever it is I write, be it advertising drivel, daily wanderings or the reproduction of truly lovely Buddhist prayers it's important to realize that in the end, this isn't about

me. It's about the readers. It's about you. – So on to the love. The first chart here is about Returning Visitors. And that's pretty important. 33.41% of the people who manage to check in just once, actually come back – so that makes them either sadists or truly gifted, inspired individuals. When Google starts giving me psychographic stats on this thing, that will r

eally be the bomb! – But, the next chart may be my favorite of the whole PowerPoint thing here – am I starting to look like Al Gore? The next chart shows Visitor Loyalty and you gotta love this one. Whilst 66.59% of the people never come back again and 8% or so only come back once before I make them mad, swing your eyes down to the bottom of this chart. Whoa! And watch the reader loyalty grow from 9-100 times they visit the site. 15% of the people who come here are coming back and back, over and over again and that spells just one thing – a growing loyal readership base. And how many is that? If 2500 people have visited the site in its life and 30% have managed to come back that would be a return of 750 people, and 15% of that number is 112.5 persons. I'm not sure who that poor 1/2 a person is but he could be just really short. So, roughly, a core of just over 100 people check in here a lot. A whole bunch. The rest of you are just party crashers so I'm gonna hire a guard to stand by the keg and shoo you away next time.

Love me long time?

The final chart today is called Visit Length. Don't we all secretly evaluate potential mates by how long they can stand to be in our company? Whatever snide things I may say about my ex-wife from time to time, I'll give her top credit in one area; she stood in the fire for nearly 15 years and you've got to give a girl points for that. Those of you who know me well will certainly agree. I even used to say myself, was that her best feature was that she p

retty much hung around and left me alone to my creative things. But on to my favorite stat of the evening (it's evening here). The Visit Length chart is revealing in the nicest of ways for a writer. It shows that of the 30 odd percent of those who hang around, 21% of you stay for more than an hour. Another significant percentage stays from five minutes, up until one hour. And that's generally good. I can see from all my stats over the last 4 months that it's taken some time to build content, but at 53 posts or so now, that is becoming less and less of an issue and so, even when a new visitor shows up, there's more to keep them interested. Through all the stats, Bounce Rates are in continual decline, Visitor Time is fairly constant, but the most important is Vist Length. That means that people are finding more and more reasons to waste their time here and that's nice. It's like having a party every week and getting to know the difference between the people who are your friends and those who just came for the free drinks. Thanks all. No moocher would have gotten this far in the post!

Drum Roll Please!

So to wrap this up all nice and tidy, we have a new Technorati score to reveal tonight. A week ago I posted that we had finally broke into the top 1% of blogs world wide and I'm happy to say that just after that, we jumped again, and then suddenly, again. To 790, 971. So that means the top 1/2% is our next target. Thanks all. I'm tired now and it's time to go to bed. Creative guys can only handle so much time with all this data you know.

Note: All stats are courtesy of StatCounter.com and Google Analytics.