site traffic

may 2012:

permies: 590,096 visits 4,247,220 pageviews
richsoil: 247,125 visits 576,863 pageviews
youtube: ~150,000 visits 233,513 views

total: ~987,221 visits 5,057,596 views

alexa: 35,302

Looking back at 2009...

paul wheaton wrote:
For October we had 29,150 "visits" and 139,959 "page views"

The latest figures show a relative growth factor of 30 times the activity.
Impressive!

The youtube stats look a lot lower. I think it is because they changed some of their algorithms and because I have not been posting as much there.

Overall, the growth over the last month seems a bit small to me - but that could be due to me being gone so much.

But yeah! Looking back over a few years, we have seen a lot of growth!

Hey Paul,

On June 1 you posted that our Alexa ranking was 35,302.
I just hovered on the icon today, and you have jumped to 30,476.

That is a huge jump in 20 days!

John Polk wrote:Hey Paul,

On June 1 you posted that our Alexa ranking was 35,302.
I just hovered on the icon today, and you have jumped to 30,476.

That is a huge jump in 20 days!

We're just that cool in the summer!

August is usually one of our slowest months.

permies.com 517,899 visits 4,156,667 pageviews
richsoil.com 352728 visits 905,303 pageviews
youtube ~140,000 visits 242,730 views


total ~1,010,627 visits 5,304,700 views


It looks like while I've been bumbling about the countryside on the tour, the empire has crossed the one million mark!

sep 2012

permies.com 549,599 visits 3,262,360 pageviews
richsoil.com 326,356 visits 809,411 pageviews
youtube ~155,000 visits 266,322 views

total: ~1,030,955 visits 4,338,093 views

june

permies: 498,012 3,933,377
richsoil: 250,543 641,907
youtube: ~130,000 214,993

total: ~878,555 4,790,277

july

permies: 515,883 4,393,127
richsoil: 289,405 726,169
youtube: ~140,000 238,117

total: ~945,288 5,357,413


total through september: ~8,491,000 47,608,279

october:

permies: 639,977 4,050,327
richsoil: 336,686 798,025
youtube: ~186,000 308,283

total: ~1,163,000 5,156,635

total through october: ~9,654,000 52,764,914

Therefore, sometime around Nov 10, I will break the 10 million mark for 2012.

november:

permies: 727,005 5,757,600
richsoil 376,985 941,409
youtube: ~274,000 514,509

total for november: ~1,378,000 7,213,518

total for 2012 through november: ~11,032,000 59,978,432

I seem to remember that up through the end of 2011, my total for all time was about 10 million. So this means that my total up to now is about 21 million.

paul wheaton wrote:I seem to remember that up through the end of 2011, my total for all time was about 10 million. So this means that my total up to now is about 21 million.

Wow, that's quite the trajectory. 2013 is looking even brighter.

woo hoo

december:

permies: 632,199 5,877,546
richsoil: 260,642 611,482
youtube: ~218,000 436,132

total for december: ~1,111,000 6,925,160

total for 2012: ~12,143,000 66,903,592

jan 1, 2005 through dec 31, 2010:
permies: 575,496 2,221,667
richsoil: 754,546 1,014,966
youtube: ~500,000 701,519
total: ~1,830,000 3,938,152

2011: 5,750,157 visits 33,954,695 views

All time through the end of 2012: ~19,720,000 104,796,439

january

permies: 794,694 6,620,965
richsoil: 326,407 829,650
youtube: ~279,000 557,807

total: ~1,400,000 8,008,422

None of the numbers calculated in this thread count podcasts, or the stuff at makeitmissoula, or anything I have done outside of these three entities.

Note: youtube provides a count for "views" and for a while they would provide "visits" for a day, but not totaled for a month. At that time "visits" were about 30% to 40% less than views. Now there is something about "unique cookies" which is about half. So now I just take views and divide in half to get visits. And then mark it as "approximate" with the tilde.

Somebody on a permaculture mailing list wanted to talk about collaboration between instructors in the pacific northwest. One of the reasons I started permies.com is that I felt there was too little collaboration between instructors in the pacific northwest. They guarded their mailing lists very closely and would rarely announce things for other instuctors. As a result, many good classes ended up getting cancelled.

Yesterday one of those instructors insisted that they do have good collaboration and felt there should be even more. As a proactive step, this person wrote:

There are a number of national portals for permaculture information/websites/organizations/sites on the internet. I usually start at the Permaculture Activist, PRI/USA, the PermaculturePortal and there are many others. Who has got the most definitive list at this point?

So I responded:

when trying to determine which sites are the largest web
sites, probably the most accurate way of measuring without those web
sites actually sharing their traffic numbers is alexa.com. It is
flawed, but it is the closest thing we have.

So, go to alexa and feed in all of the sites and see what you come back with.

I talked with Maddy Harland this morning. The permaculture magazine
site gets 1.2 million visitors per year. So about 100,000 per
month.

permaculture.org.au: 335,044
permacultureusa.org: 1,443,614
permaculture.co.uk: 300,287
permacultureportal.com: 6,730,067
permacultureactivist.net: 478,602
friendsofthetrees.net: 5,066,941
permaculture.net 3,563,697

So it would seem that maddy is the winner in this bunch. The rest of
the sites must, therefore, get fewer than 100,000 visitors per month.

permies.com has an alexa rank of 30,059 and, in january had 794,694
visitors. This is not counting the 326,407 to richsoil.com or the
~279,000 to my youtube channel or any of the podcast stuff.

To clarify - your second quote block above was your reply to the list.

One piece in your reply that might have been confusing to non-techies is that the numbers next to the permaculture sites that you listed are their alexa rankings, not the number of visitors. And I imagine lots of folks do not know that the lower the alexa ranking number, the higher the rank (and the more visitors). Or, their eyes glazed over at the idea of numbers and ranks, so they didn't get the inference(s).

Jocelyn Campbell wrote:To clarify - your second quote block above was your reply to the list.

Good catch! Fixed!

One piece in your reply that might have been confusing to non-techies is that the numbers next to the permaculture sites that you listed are their alexa rankings, not the number of visitors. And I imagine lots of folks do not know that the lower the alexa ranking number, the higher the rank (and the more visitors). Or, their eyes glazed over at the idea of numbers and ranks, so they didn't get the inference(s).

I did write that super late last night.

So, yes, google has an alexa rank of 1 and serves billions of people.

Just checked Alexa
Traffic Rank in US: 4,696
Traffic Rank Global: 19804

I have let this slip. In October of 2012 I shifted gears from "infect as many brains as possible" to "get money to get land to prove things in my head". So the numbers appear to be holding pretty steady for the empire:

So, for all of 2013:

permies: 9,125,147
richsoil: 4,027,883
youtube: ~2,300,000


Total visitors for 2013: ~15.4 million

All time total through the end of 2012 was ~19.7 million. This brings the all time total to ~35.1 million people through the end of 2013.


And our Alexa rank is now 23,320.

Nice job on the site's growth Paul!

I wish you well on your goal to get money to get land to prove things in your head.

Cheers,

Chris

january:

permies: 1,000,053 visits 7,453,363 pageviews
richsoil: 310,668 visits 858,377 pageviews
youtube: 403,253 views

are those the numbers just for the month of January?

Landon Sunrich wrote:are those the numbers just for the month of January?

Yup.

That's really cool. Encouraging too. How does that count work. I know I'm guilty of opening like 20 tabs at a time. Is each time I do that counted as visit? Or each time I get auto-logged out and then log back in?

I used to keep track of the algorithms for counting, now I just echo what the reports say.

Yeah, 7.5M page views is a pretty killer number. Kinda speaks for itself even if there are some recounts here and there. May it grow exponentially!

Kinda needing some quick, rough stats ....

Since late 2012, permies and richsoil stats have been holding pretty steady ...

So ... grabbing the last 365 days ...

permies: 10.1 million visitors, 92.4 million pageviews
richsoil: 3.5 million visitors, 10.8 million pageviews


the numbers through dec 31, 2011:

permies: 4.0 million visitors, 30.9 million pageviews
richsoil: 2.2 million visitors, 4.0 million pageviews


2012: (thanks jocelyn for helping me with the math!)
permies: 6.7 million visitors, 55.0 million pageviews
richsoil: 3.2 million visitors, 8.1 million pageviews

2013 (approximate):
permies: 10.1 million visitors, 92.4 million pageviews
richsoil: 3.5 million visitors, 10.8 million pageviews

2014 (approximate):
permies: 10.1 million visitors, 92.4 million pageviews
richsoil: 3.5 million visitors, 10.8 million pageviews


So, a rough guess at numbers for all time through Dec 31, 2014:

permies: 30.9 million visitors, 270.7 million pageviews
richsoil: 12.4 million visitors, 44.5 million pageviews


Youtube says that total views for all time up through dec 31, 2014 is 14.0 million views.

It seems that in the past, youtube "visits" was about 60% of views, I think it might be safe to say that youtube visitors might be 8.4 million.

Therefore, between permies.com, richsoil.com and youtube, for all time there has been 51.6 million people served up through December 31, 2014.

- - -

So far this year:

permies: 8.8 million visitors, 71.7 million pageviews
richsoil: 3.0 million visitors, 9.4 million pageviews
youtube: 2.3 million views



And now for the numbers I've been fishing for ...

Totals up to this moment:

permies: 39.7 million visitors, 342.4 million pageviews
richsoil: 15.4 million visitors, 53.9 million pageviews
youtube: 16.3 million views

So, to this moment, my permaculture stuff has reached about 64.9 million people with 412.6 million views/pageviews.

I uploaded this to another thread, so I thought I would just share it here for giggles.

This is the server log for permies.com

Congrats on the staggering numbers!

I don't think I would call it 65 million people. Web stats are normally presenting in black in white numbers, so it gives the impression of being accurate, but it is instead a single interpretation of the data. A different method of analyzing the data often paints an entirely different picture of what is happening.

I think visits/visitors from your data is actually sessions or visits, and not unique people. I come to the site pretty much everyday, so I am a single person, with 365 sessions/year. I imagine many of the the repeat visitors here pile up repeat sessions/visits, which makes that 65 million number a bit inflated

That takes nothing away from the success of the site, but "65 million visits" is a more accurate phrase than "65 million people."

The number of people, or unique visitors, is a nearly impossible number to track down. You really need to pull the visitor data over the entire time period, and all of your visitors need to use the same hardware to visit to get an exact count (most analytics systems use either IP address or cookies to define a unique visitor). I use a home computer, work computer, phone, tablet, etc. and each device makes me look like a different person, but I am indeed a single person the last time I checked Some really complicated analytics systems use big-brothery type stuff to combine visits from different into a single person when possible, but my guess is they would choke on the sheer volume of traffic that the Wheaton Empire gets.

It is also very likely that the visitors to richsoil.com and permies.com overlap a lot, so if you run the numbers for each site separately, it again inflates the number of total people...

In my experience, unless filtered out, nearly half of the traffic to websites is automated bot visits. For example, google visits your website with a program/spider that automatically visits and indexes some/all or you website pages. The other search engines do the same thing, as do hackers, and companies trying to sell you stuff.

Hope that helps - just trying to help you prevent some web geek skeptic from shooting holes in the "65 millions people" phrase...

And, of course, it is actually far more complicated than that.

We can have 40 people here at wheaton labs. And when they all pile on to permies.com - from the perspective of web logging like this - they all look like one person (one IP).

For a lot of IP addresses there will be more than one permies.com enthusiast.

And then what about people at a coffee shop, or people sharing internet with their next door neighbor.

Bots will generate a lot of traffic - usually from one IP.

-----

The important part: the relationship between "visits", "visitors" and "people" can fill a book and still not be accurate. However, in the end, it does work out to be pretty close. Especially since such a large part of our traffic is from search engines.

I think for somebody that is so very knowledgeable about this stuff, the most important thing that you see here is the ratio of pageviews to visits.

This debate could turn into something fun, but probably not productive, so feel free to tell me to sit down and I will

The only thing I was debating was the accuracy of the phrase "65 million-ish people." If you said "tens of millions of people," I would not have said anything, because I would have agreed with that statement. I guess too much of my life, I have experienced people using numbers to support their agendas. I am sure you have groaned or rolled your eyes multiple times when people said stuff like "my website gets a million hits a day"

I would agree with most of your points a few years ago, but my guess is that half of your traffic is now on mobile devices, and mobile devices inflate the number of visitors drastically. Your scenarios account for some of that, but I am not swayed.

Search traffic is also less definitive since Google stopped sharing the organic keyword used. The majority of search traffic is normally branded, even when a site ranks for tons of high-traffic non-branded organic keywords. It is like people only know how to use Google to get to websites, and have no idea how to use bookmarks or web addresses. I constantly have to remind myself that the way I, a web geek, use the internet is drastically different than how "normal' folks use websites. How I do things is not better or worse, but a career doing something with other people in that same career, has a tendency to diverge from how the majority not in that career do things.

What would be most impressive to me would be the number of repeat visitors, and how often they come back and how many pages they look at. How long they spend on the site would also be an amazing stat. I doubt many if any websites could match those engagements statistics with the empire.

Let's say half of the visitors are new visitors that bounce after a single page view (gross generalization, but pretty close). That means that that number of page views is even more impressive, because it essentially doubles from 9 pages per visit to 18 pages per visit.

I don't want to be a devil's advocate here, so what is the intent for sharing these numbers? There may be a different way to present the numbers in a way that supports your goal. I prefer to help and not antagonize

When I started this thread, I was focused on infecting brains and building community. These are metrics.

Now, I think a big part of what we are doing is trying to reach the tipping point. To get permaculture to be a household word, I think you need to reach 10% of the population. Now we could debate about US population vs. global population .... but the key is that we are about a factor of ten short.

Next up is the key that permies.com is embracing the word "permaculture" despite the fact that a lot of the bigs are looking for alternative words that can be taken more seriously. I hope that if we reach enough people and set "permaculture" up as a serious word, then we can bring those folks back into the fold.

At the same time, I think if a person were to make a chart out of these numbers .... it is really clear that I cut way back on infecting brains in october of 2012. That's when I shifted focus to getting land and putting a lot of focus on stuff on said land. Before the shift, we were seeing the empire get about 3.5 times bigger each year. After the shift, growth has been pretty small.

Much, much more ...

Back to people vs. visits vs. visitors: all of your arguments are valid. The important point is if you want to know how many people have been here so far, and how many people this year compared to last year ... this is pretty close. Flawed, but, for our purposes, close enough.

paul wheaton wrote:
I think for somebody that is so very knowledgeable about this stuff, the most important thing that you see here is the ratio of pageviews to visits.

That ratio is astonishing. On my best websites I'm lucky to average 3.5 pageviews per visit, which is in line with your richsoil numbers. But the 10:1 (roughly) ratio you have here at the forum is really special.

.

OK, I will jump in and ask some tough questions...

1. Is bigger better? Will critical mass for the word "permaculture" translate into more responsible living for individuals and better laws protecting the planet? Or will bigger mean more income from banner ads that then allows good research to happen at Wheaton Labs? What will "more visits to permiesdotcom" translate into with respect to the future?

2. Paul identified that permiesdotcom grew faster when it was his prime focus. I'm the type of person who tends to feel that at some point actually doing something in a concrete way becomes important for a strong foundation, and I see Wheaton Labs as part of that foundation. Do others see that in the same way? Do others see the Lab and the experiments as supporting the worth of the permies community?

3. Labels, like "permaculture" can be good or bad depending on who's using them and why. Some people are using other terms for very similar concepts and presenting that as "special" - branding what they do to make their way seem different or unique. That's what advertising is all about. Is that important to permiesdotcom? Should it be?

4. Unfortunately, the most important thing to me about "permaculture" is probably immeasurable with current tools. I personally don't care what "brand" you call the concepts - Restoration Agriculture, Greening the Desert, Keyline ploughing, etc, etc, or how big the egos are of the people who want their brand to be special. All I care about is that my great grandchildren have a better planet than the one we're currently on the path to leaving them. If getting more people to visit permiesdotcom will improve the odds of that happening, then how can the permies community help that happen? What are the goals for permies that advertising will help? Personally, I'd feel dumb just saying, "go check out permiesdotcom and help save the planet". I'd need more concrete talking points, preferably with some humour or catchy phrases that would stick in people's heads. I've gotten some good mileage out of Paul's "making a better world through learning good things rather than being angry at bad guys" quote. Would working on more things like that help the cause?

This thread is about statistics that Paul identifies as "flawed but close enough", and those should just be used as a guide to help not just to keep us on the right path, but maybe to help us think about being on the right map as well!

permies (visits/pageviews)

jan (984,063/10,356,454)

feb (942,800/10,048,982)

mar (1,086,536/10,334,242)

So .... that's a cool threshold! We had over one million visits in March!

permies traffic for april

1,088,711 visits

10,639,006 pageviews

All traffic through the end of 2014:

permies: 30.9 million visits, 270.7 million pageviews
richsoil: 12.4 million visits, 44.5 million pageviews
youtube: 14.0 million views

2015:

permies: 10.3 million visits, 97.0 million pageviews
richsoil: 3.6 million visits, 10.5 million pageviews
youtube: 2.7 million views

all time through the end of 2015:

permies: 41.2 million visits, 367.7 million pageviews
richsoil: 16.0 million visits, 35.0 million pageviews
youtube: 16.7 million views

83 million ....

+ ~ 4 million via permies

+ ~ 2 million via richsoil and youtube ...

So, as of this moment, it is plausible that my stuff has reached about 89 million people. And we might hit 100 million by the end of the year.

stats for the first half of 2016.

permies.com:  6.4 million visits and 62.6 million pageviews.
richsoil.com:   1.6 million visits and 4.4 million pageviews.
youtube: 1.1 million views