While we're doing navel-gazing blog analysis, let's take a look at how the number of visitors to diamond geezer varies across the day. Again I'm taking my data from last Wednesday, a fairly standard post about Jane Austen, posted as normal at 7am.
7-7.30am
7.30-8am
8-8.30am
8.30-9am
9-9.30am
9.30-10am
visitors
138
157
141
117
124
88
per minute
4½
5
4½
4
4
3
Don't worry about precisely how these numbers are being counted. No stats package is 100% accurate, and in an era of cookie-rejection they're probably an underestimate anyway. The thing to focus on is the underlying pattern, and whether it's down or up.
The busiest time on this blog is 7.00-8.30am, when the post is fresh. Numbers are still high at 9am as people settle down to work. But things start to fall away around 9.30am.... and never reach these heights again.
To see this more clearly, here's a graph showing the number of visitors hour by hour across the day. There's quite a drop.
The big spike is immediately after the post is published, but that initial burst is not sustained. Numbers then stabilise between 10am and 2pm at a rate of approximately 150 readers an hour (which is 60% of the original peak). After lunch the number of visitors steps down to about 100, a rate which is sustained beyond the end of the working day until the late evening. A pronounced fall kicks in after 11pm, or more especially midnight, with overnight visitors merely trickling in through the small hours.
I like that numbers rise again between 6am and 7am, despite there not normally being a new post to read. But the most astonishing jump is the one the graph conceals, either side of 7am, from 62 visitors in the hour before to 277 in the hour after. I have trained you to turn up at 7am, and so you do, like Pavlov's dogs.
n.b. I have a Twitter bot called @diamondgzrblog which announces every new post on diamond geezer, and which is currently followed by about 780 people. But every day only about a dozen people click through from there to here, making it an unexpectedly inefficient means of generating traffic. Most other newsfeed platforms depend on social media click-throughs to survive, whereas I really do rely on people simply remembering to turn up.
To look at the figures another way, a quarter of my daily visitors have been and gone by 9.30am, and half of them by lunchtime. You can also see this reflected in the number of comments people leave on the blog. The busiest time for comments is always first thing in the morning, with the majority in place by lunchtime, and very few appear after 6pm in the evening.
One final thing to mention is how visitor numbers vary by day of the week. If we set Wednesday's total as the benchmark, and call that 100, this is the general pattern.
Monday
104
Tuesday
100
Wednesday
100
Thursday
99
Friday
100
Saturday
85
Sunday
95
Most weekdays are very similar, with Thursday's 99 probably a statistical blip. But Monday's total is almost always a bit higher, on average by about 4%, which I put down to readers coming back after the weekend and catching up. The Monday bounce was even more pronounced back in the days before smartphones and tablets came along, because people weren't necessarily anywhere near a computer over the weekend.
Weekends do still see the fewest visitors, however. For every 100 visitors that turn up on a Wednesday only 85 do the same on a Saturday, I guess because people generally have better things to do. Historically speaking, hot sunny Saturdays have the lowest take-up rates of all. Sundays aren't quite so low, I think because Sunday evenings have always been a time for quiet online catching-up. But anything I post on a Sunday still generally gets seen by 5% fewer people than something I post midweek... so thanks for being here today!
