Interesting trend for woodworking forums

Ian Gillis

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Nova Scotia's beautiful south shore
Hi

There's a website Alexa.com that provides usage stats for the top 100,000 busiest sites on the web. I guess it's mostly interesting for advertising purposes. I was tipped off by Keith at SMC when he mentioned their Alexa ranking in a thread.

I've visited several times (sorry, be we haven't cracked the top 100,000 yet) and I noticed that all the woodworking forums that I could find in the top 100K show usage trends that are all following a similar pattern.

I isolated the forum URL's from the hosting sites, eg
"forums.taunton.com/fw-knots/" rather than "Taunton.com", to focus only on woodworking forums.

So without further ado, here's a link to the chart I created. The graph is interactive so you can plug in other sites or change the time span.

Forum Comparison

Lemme know what you think about the trend and what might be behind it.

Have fun !
 
Interesting....

Ian, from what I can tell, only 2% of the folks visiting the Taunton site end up on their forum. If correct...that would make Woodnet the largest forum... participation wise. Not sure I'm reading that correctly though.

They sure all track similar paths. If you look at the 3 year trends it's even more telling. Wonder what was happening the 1st quarter of 06 to cause such a jump in all the forums?

What's behind the recent downward trend? Here's my guesses

David Mark's program was very popular and when DIY canceled it...folks just gave up talking about woodworking?:huh:

The Miss USA pageant caught Norm in a compromising situation and we're all waiting for the Donald to give him another chance?:huh:

So many folks got upset with forum moderators that they quit typing and got back to woodworking?:huh:

It's that new upstart forum FW for sure:thumb:
 
Interesting....

Ian, from what I can tell, only 2% of the folks visiting the Taunton site end up on their forum. If correct...that would make Woodnet the largest forum...

I isolated the URL for fw/knots ... so even 2% or Taunton's traffic is a heck of a lot. Unless I didn't do it right :dunno:

What's behind the recent downward trend? Here's my guesses

David Mark's program was very popular and when DIY canceled it...folks just gave up talking about woodworking?:huh:

The Miss USA pageant caught Norm in a compromising situation and we're all waiting for the Donald to give him another chance?:huh:

So many folks got upset with forum moderators that they quit typing and got back to woodworking?:huh:

It's that new upstart forum FW for sure:thumb:

Those all make good sense - especially the last one ! :)
 
John pointed out a problem with my graph - whatever lower level URL I enter, Alexa spits out the stats for the top level domain.

So, Taunton in particular is way out of whack. SMC should be fairly accurate - I don't know about WoodCentral or Woodnet.

Dagnabbit!!! So much for my grand revelation :( :bang:

Sawwy bout dat

Ian G
 
I think its still very interesting. If you look at the 5 year stats, clearly early 2006 was an aberration, and traffic is returning to "normal" levels. What could it have been???:dunno:

I'll bet the Family Wood Working (FWW) traffic is somehow getting buried in the Taunton Fine Wood Working (FWW) traffic:rolleyes:

In any case, I'm looking for quality, not necessarily quantity and the Family seems to be the place to be:thumb:
 
Up through 2005 were heavy years for the expansion and deployment of Cable modems and DSL. More people getting on the net, checking things out, going places, and then tapering off.

You see a lot of people join forums, stay awhile and interact some, and then just disappear. I would also suggest a lot of information is out there gets repetitive and people lose interest.

I do agree, over-moderation is annoying. I have seen it on multiple sites and it turns me off. Contrary, you end up having a few people on a site that are not moderators that force their opinions on everyone and that in turn causes them to leave.

I am kind of curious as to how they are collecting these statistics. I will have to poke around when I go back to work on Monday.
 
heck i`d rather have 25 folks who get along than 25k who bicker-n-complain;)

that the biggest reason i am here most of the time, i have more posts in shorter time period than i had at the other place and it sure aint becasue i am smarter or beter lookin i just get along with you folk better, must yall got lots of patients:) and no i aint trying to gain points bby say crap to get another post no.. i aint built that way:thumb:
 
I'm pretty dubious about Alexa figures overall.

It's based on tracking the surfing habits of the poor smucks that have the Alexa spyware installed on their PC :doh:

Any more experienced internet user will be running some sort of Spyware scanner and deleting that sort of stuff with extreme predjudice.

Are the figures falling because of less hits, or more savvy web surfers deleting their monitoring software?

Ian
 
heck i`d rather have 25 folks who get along than 25k who bicker-n-complain;)
As the others chimed in 25 folks who get along will beat the team of 25 superstars. Ditto:thumb: :thumb:
What is really nice is to see one of the new members joining in and getting involved as noted by their number of postings. It is always nice to see people testing the waters with questions they are almost afraid to ask, yet they recieve 1,2 or more people willing to help them with that very matter. I really like that about this forum. Thanks Family...!:thumb: A little poke in fun never hurt either :wave: :D :rofl:
Shaz
 
Agree. Once a forum starts taking itself too seriously, it goes downhill from there. I find this forum's openness and friendly demeanor quite refreshing. People here really want to help, and it encourages others to jump right in.

Cheers,

Kevin
 
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