1 June 2022

It’s been ten years since I last posted some statistics about the site – time flies!

Let’s see what’s happened since then…

Diary, Encyclopedia and annotations

Ten years ago the 3,434 diary entries had 58,603 annotations. That’s now grown to 71,769, so there was obviously plenty still to discover and discuss on the second read-through. It’s an average of about 20 annotations per diary entry.

The Encyclopedia now has 5,084 topics, up from 4,790 in 2021. 2,815 of those are people. 1,153 of the topics have links to their Wikipedia pages (I said this was 2,549 ten years ago, which can’t have been correct).

There are now 12,321 annotations in the Encyclopedia, up from 9,425 a decade ago.

Articles have 298 comments, Site News has 1,374, and Letters have 6.

So, in total, there are 85,768 annotations/comments across the whole site, up from 69,585 in 2012.

Visitors, page views, etc.

According to Google Analytics, since 1 December 2005 (roughly when I started using it) we’ve had just over 24 million page views and 1,350,000 “users” or 4,550,000 “new users” (I’m not sure exactly what those mean).

Over the course of May 2022 we had 90,405 page views and 17,243 users.

Here’s a chart showing the number of page views per month since 2006:

We can see the second cycle through the diary has had slightly fewer views than the first, unsurprisingly, but around 100,000 page views per month across the site still seems like quite a lot.

Here’s a map showing where visitors to the site have come from since this read of the diary started in January 2012:

And here’s a table of what percentage of users have come from which country:

Since January 2012, 61% of “users” were “New Visitors” versus 39% who were “Returning Visitors”.

Here’s where visitors to the site came from: 60% from a search engine, and 30% “direct” visitors (e.g. browser bookmarks, or typing in the URL).

Unfortunately I don’t have any data on which queries people have used on search engines, that resulted in them visiting the site – I think I should have changed a setting in Google Analytics when the site switched from http to https some years ago. Shows how often I look at the stats!

Over the first five months of 2022, here are the most popular web browsers used to access the site:

And using these operating systems:

Twitter

The @samuelpepys Twitter account started tweeting excerpts from the diary entries in “real time” in 2009 and by the end of the first cycle in 2012 it had 31,398 followers.

Now, after the account’s first complete cycle of the diary, it has 71,016 followers. It tweeted 13,873 tweets over the course of the diary – this will probably be fewer next time, because the maximum length of tweets grew from 140 characters when the diary started in 2012, to 280 now.

RSS feeds

According to the stats on Feedburner, the diary RSS feed has 282 subscribers, a figure which dropped suddenly and drastically in 2021 as seen by the green line on this graph:

That’s always been a strange and erratic graph and I don’t think a count of RSS subscribers can be accurate these days. I’m guessing the big drop was something to do with Google suddenly paying the service more attention last year.

(What are RSS feeds?)

Email

Those changes at Feedburner also meant moving the daily email newsletter from the service – which was a very simple one – to the same place as the email discussion group, Groups.io. This process proved to be frustratingly complicated for all involved, for which I apologise.

At the time of the change over there were 2,559 people on the previous email list, with 1,931 marked as “active” and being sent emails.

The new diary-entries email list has 455 subscribers.

The main discussion group has 637 members, although some of those are people who had to subscribe in order to subscribe to the diary-entries “sub group”. Maybe I can simplify this process before the diary starts again.

Let me know if you have any other questions about this kind of thing and I’ll see if I can find the answers.