moanblog

It has been just over a week since we launched on the 11th of this month. I’d just like to extend my thank you from the first blog post, and express my gratitude for submitting moans and just generally browsing and checking out the site.

On that note, I would like to share some stats with you all just to let you all know exactly how we’ve done. We’ve got Google Analytics tracking all of our users around the Internet. Ok, well not exactly all around the Internet but just the site itself and it has proven to be a great insight into how your users interact with your site (yeah, you can probably tell it’s the first time I’ve properly used it ).

This image shows the total number of visitors moanlog had from the 11th to the 18th. As you can see, the day we launched we attracted 17 hits, of which 12 were uniques. The 12th however was a different story with 112 hits with 71 uniques.

Here’s a breakdown of the daily visits and uniques.

According to this, the average time spent on the site is 5:35, which either means people are reading through the content of the site, rather than loading it, thinking what is this rubbish, and closing it. Or, it means our usability is so poor, people are spending lots of time trying to find their way round. Although, if that was the case, the average time spent on the site would be lower as people generally give a site a few seconds before they get fustrated.

So what are visitors doing when upon loading the site?

According to this image, they’re loving the random function, submit is second most popular, which is a good thing on a site that lives on user submissions, they’re checking out who we are by visiting the about page and also browsing the moans on /browse/n/n. That’s pretty good, although I personally would like for people to care less about who we are and browse more.

Anyway, that’s enough stats for the time being. I’m going to post updates on the stats situation as we go.

So what do I make of the stats? I think the total hit count and uniques are quite impressive, especially taking how we launched into consideration. When we launched, all we did was change our status messages on various social networking sites and IM programs. Yeah, that was our launch. Months of hard work, just announced in the same notion as we tell people what we’re doing on, say Twitter.

I was not expecting half a billion hits in the first day, I wasn’t even thinking of 100 uniques in the first week. Why? We’re nobody on the Internet and we played it as such. So for a bunch of guys with no clout online, it’s not bad. The pageviews and uniques are decreasing, which I’m not too worried about. The fact of the matter is, we need more publicity. We’ll see how things pan out as they are, I’ve got no plan to launch some advertising campaign nor do we have the time for it. As the about page says, this is an experiment.

This is all I have to say on the matter, like I said up top, I’ll post more as we go.

- Gaurav