Many people come to asking about our readership, where our readers come from and how fast we’re growing as a blog. These conversation have many times spurred very interesting conversations and made me analyze the value we provide much more closely as I would’ve otherwise done. I’m always thankful for all the comments and questions, since they make us think about how to build the blog into a more valuable destionation to our readers to visit and what they are most interested in reading.
The other days when I was reading a blog post by an American VC, Fred Wilson, who has probably the most read VC blog in the world, I realized that I have never told you directly those figures, even though the very conversations spurred by the numbers have been so valuable to us. So here goes.
We get little over 10 000 unique visitors a month and about 30 000 page views (and we very rarely cut the blog post so that you need to click to ‘Read more’ to see the rest of the story as for example TechCrunch does, since this effectively double’s the page views as the site loads again. A nice trick to fool the advertisers) . RSS subscribers we have about 600. All of this traffic is originating from no less than 130 countries. Yes, the growth has been very rapid as we are just little over one year old. But where it gets interesting is when we go beyond the pure readership.
Amazingly, we get a lot of the traffic from Facebook. I have pulled a feed from the blog to my Twitter account, which I have in turn plugged-in my Facebook status update, effectively cross- posting ArcticStartup blog updates to the services I use the most and where most of my social graph resides. Before I had my personal Twitter feed pulled to Facebook and all the @messages made little sense to my Facebook friends, I just recently decided to pull the ArcticStartup blog specific Twitter feed there, but for some reason it’s not working very well. Antti, Miikka and Karri all seem to import AS blog posts in different way to Facebook. I believe Miikka imports the blog post as notes, whereas Antti and Karri occasionally post them manually. I might be wrong here though.
Equally interesting is the traffic coming from Twitter. This traffic has and is growing fast as the Nordic and Baltic countries are familiarising themselves with the new micromessaging communication tool. I’m quite certain we’re about the see a similar boom in Twitter adoptation as we saw with Facebook which didn’t leave anyone cold. That said, It might take longer than it took for Facebook to swipe across the Nordic and Baltic countires. This is because it is not as easy to see the value in Twitter as it is in Facebook. Facebook most people got almost instantly and started visiting the site franticly already after the first week. With Twitter it takes much longer time which can mean from several weeks to months depending on how many people you start following. I also believe it’s not only in how many people you follow, it just takes time to build the habit of going back to the page (or client) and see the value in jumping on and off the funny stream of links and info bits. And some people might not ever get there. Still, I think it’s going to grow fast and we’re about the feel that also here in the arctics. It’s going to be the most talked about the service of 2009 and it’s going to be felt in every company and school.
Even more interesting the the traffic sources are the list of countries where the traffic is coming from. I find it nothing short of amazing that we receive traffic on average from 130 countries. Needless to say our readership is truly global. The top 10 consists of the usuals suspects of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, The United States and UK, but what more interesting ones are India and The Netherlands. This is a clear measure of the activity around the technology startups in those countries.
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
From which month(s) are these stats?
Otherwise congratulations to such fast growth, its very impressive.
Hendrik M,
The screen shots are from this mohth, but the figures you see tend to change slightly from day to day, so the figures you see in the screen shots are a point in time representation for the purposes of capturing the top then traffic sources and the top ten countries that the traffic comes from.
The monthly averages are laid out in the third paragraph.
What about RSS stats? I assume most of regular visitors read the RSS and rarely come to your website.
Ville,
thanks for clarifying – the flunssa must have had my head clouded =)
Hi
Interesting info. How many are unique visits/visitors? i.e. IP based?
Vesa,
We get little over 10 000 unique visitors a month (Third paragraph in the blog post)
Jüri,
We have around 600 daily RSS subscribers. (Third paragraph in the blog post)
Hendrik M,
No problem. I really need to double check what I’ve wrote as nobody seems to see those stats =)
The TC pageview logic may be jumping into conclusions, but it surely does have somekind of an effect – it may more than double the PVs, since there are more than one article that readers click through to. It also depends on the preview TC shows. If there’s a dramatic start and a sentence that gets cut halfway and you have to click through to read the rest of it, I’m pretty sure the PVs increase for that item.
Same thing on the RSS feed. I’m sure there’s somekind of a study about RSS behaviour when it comes to truncated items – not sure whether reader frustration from truncating is worth the increased pageviews.
I think you should experiment.