Thursday, January 25, 2007

More stats

Sportingo is growing and on the 16 of January we hit a milestone, the first time we had over 10,000 visitors on the site in one day. To be exact we had 11,663 visitors on the site on that day. We have been flirting with the 10,000 figure since early in January and it felt good for the moment to break it (our next goal 100,000 a day). Measuring traffic can get to be addictive. I got emails from some of our authors that go back to check the stats on their article every 10 minutes. It is very satisfying to see people responding you’re an article you wrote and knowing that someone out there took the time to read it. I wish I could meet with every one of the people that visited the site on that day, unfortunately I could not even manage reading all the articles that we published that day. Turning a general number into a specific person is what makes the social web so unique. In the past week I have emailed with a new contributor from Australia, a Shaun who is working on their Phd on English history from Oxford, a Mathematics Phd candidate from the US and an Indian Engineering Phd candidate (I guess we are attracting a smart crowd). I will try featuring some of the more interesting people that I get to meet through Sportingo in future posts.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Site Stats and long tail

I have been analyzing the data about the sites first four months of operation and wanted to share some of my insight (by the way if there is anyone reading this blog that is expert on Google Analytics I could use some help).
Our traffic is growing considerable and we are reaching thousands of readers each day. We are running an internal bet on when the site will hit 500,000 visits a month with my bet on April 26 2007.
An interesting phenomenon I have noticed that about a third of my daily traffic is directed toward older articles. The extreme example is an article about Rugby published on Nov 26 2006 that continues to get comments about it almost six weeks after it was published (it is up to 90 comments). I guess this is an example of our own long tail. The more quality content you create and get indexed on the web the more people will come to visit the site. With our current growth rate and the amount of great new content being published on the site I expect these numbers to grow considerably over the next few months. I wonder how much of the traffic for traditional sport site is directed to their archive compared to the day to day news.
Our traffic remains predominately European with over 40% coming from the UK around 20% from North America other important markets are Australia, Singapore, India, Malaysia, Ireland, Norway and Israel.
Cricket was our most popular category in December with a lot of coverage focused on the Ashes. While Tennis had the highest number of readers per article.

We continue to see a serge in the number of people signing up to write on Sportingo and overall the quality of articles is excellent. I will try getting some data about the writers for my next update.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

New Year New Media and New Trends?

The web is full of end of year summarizes and predictions for 2007. Time’s selection of You as the person of the year has been covered extensively as the idea of user generated content seems to have taken over day to day conversations (do conversations about UGC also count as UGC?) .

Is UGC over hyped? What can we expect for 2007?

I think that the term might have been over hyped recently but not the reality behind it. People connect with other people, we spend most of our life talking with other people, arguing, and sharing our opinions with the people we know. This has been true from the beginning of time. Technology has enables our circle of friends to grow and created better opportunities for us to reach out and find some other person that has an opinion we care to hear or share our own opinion with more people then we could ever imagine.

I believe that when people write a blog they don’t think of a number of people that will read it but rather about how they would present the point in a discussion with a friend, or possibly a stranger they strike up a conversation on a plan on train ride. That is what makes UGC so interesting for the majority of us, we feel the human contact. It is not a crafted message created by a spokesperson, PR maverick or bureaucrat but rather represents the most basic way of communication we all feel so comfortable with.

With more and more of the media becoming alienated we have an inherent desire for the simple conversation that UGC can offer. A feeling that we can get to know the writer, they are just another person and not the mouth piece of some unknown media organization. This is a simple truth that is part of our human experience and will continue to grow the amount and popularity of UGC.

At Sportingo we are offering a platform to deal with one aspect of UGC which is fans passion for sports. The amount of articles on our site continues to grow at a brisk pace and we are already working on next versions of the site that will include more media and even better ways for fans and writers to share their thoughts.

The notion that if you build it they will come is proving itself as more and more people find their way to Sportingo and many other UGC sites share their thoughts with a growing global audience.