Hello everyone.

I meant to do something like this a few months back at the start of September, when it had been a year since the site first went live. Unfortunately that didn't happen, but it's better late than never!


First of all, a big thank-you to everyone. Making the transition to Read and Find Out from Wotmania was the first big hurdle, and it seems to have gone as well as I could have hope. We lost a lot of people on the way, which was expected, but we've also gained people who were never at Wotmania.


So where've we come from, Boss?

I thought I'd give you all a peek at the traffic trends across the past 14 months. The following is taken from Google Analytics for the period 1st Sept 2009 to 31st Oct 2010:

Visits:
<img src="http://www.readandfindout.com/resources/images/stats/visits.jpg" alt="Visitor graph" />
Total unique visitors: 101,023


Pageviews:
<img src="http://www.readandfindout.com/resources/images/stats/pageviews.jpg" alt="Pageview graph" />
Total pageviews: 9,555,134


As you can see, the site had a lot of visitors and pageviews right after launch, which quickly tailed away. There was a brief peak around October 2009 when the new WoT book launched, then the site settled into a fairly steady pageview rate of around 18,000 hits a day. There's been a slow but steady rise recently, probably associated with traffic to the WoT board for Towers of Midnight.

Visitors trends slightly different, in that they've increased a lot more recently. The fact that they haven't affected pageviews much means they're likely new users arriving here from search results and not hanging around for long. Again, this increase is almost certainly related to Towers of Midnight.

(In case you're interested, the "jaggedness" of the graph line shows how the traffic varies over a week. Most traffic arrives Mon-Fri, with a dip over the weekend. Each "tooth" in the graph line shows a single week's traffic!

Also, the big spike in visits at the end of July 2010 is when Brandon Sanderson linked to the Books board on Facebook/Twitter for our Way of Kings giveaway. Impressive what it does, right?).

So, that's where we've been.


And where do we want to go?

Well, we want to grow. I'd like to see more people coming to the site on a regular basis, registering, and participating in discussions on the Books board and all the other boards throughout the site.


Anything I can do to help?

You can introduce your friends to the site. Print off some flyers, and leave 'em in books in the library. Spread the word at other forums you visit.

More importantly though, you can participate in the site. Have a look around on the other boards. See something you like? Jump in and leave comments! Start a conversation, join in.


I like browsing around and reading things, but participaing isn't my thing...

That's cool. I'm not trying to force people into writing reviews. What we need to be aware of though is that without someone providing content, there'll be nothing for you to browse through and read! And at the moment, we're relying on a very small group of people to provide that content.

So, give it a go. Even if it's just commenting on something someone else has done. Like it? Say so! You never know, you may enjoy it



So, that's pretty much all I wanted to say. Thanks again to everyone; seeing people using the site makes the effort worthwhile!

If you have any questions about stats, or anything I've said, please leave a comment below or drop me a noteboard

Cheerio for now,
Ben



Note: First person to make a "Cotten Eyed Joe" reference gets shot.