Roger Clarke’s Web-Site Statistics © Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd,  1995-2013
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I launched this site in mid-February 1995, when the Web was still pretty young.
The cumulative hit-count passed 40 million in late 2012, after 18 years. Hits are currently running at between 3.0 and 3.5 million p.a.

On the basis of sample surveys (most recently in Oct-Nov 2008 and Oct 2009), the split of hits across the c. 1500 pages in the various segments within the site is roughly as follows:

• 35-50% to c. 700 pages on eBusiness (EC), info infrastructure (II) and identity (ID)
• 25-35% to c. 400 pages on dataveillance and privacy (DV)
• 10% to c. 200 pages in the 'other papers' segment (SOS)
• 10% to c. 30 central and navigation pages (home, What's New, Site Search, etc.)
• 10% to the recently-added Bunhybee, Southwater Downs and Gallery sub-sites
• 3-5% to c. 20 pages on Waltzing Matilda (WM)
• 3-5% to c. 200 pages in other minor segments

Details

Up to 27 Mar 2013 (when I switched to a new ISP), the cumulative hit-count of 41 million comprised:

• 0.8m in 1Q 2013:
  • Webalizer (including robots, which may be higher than 40% at the moment)
  • AWStats – Summary and List of URLs (excluding robots)
• 3.0m in 2012, reported on using:
  • Webalizer (including robots, which appeared to be exactly 40% of hits)
  • AWStats – Summary and List of URLs (excluding robots). These show 634,000 human page-downloads,
    277,000 visits (low 'stickiness' – 2.3 pages per visit), from 200,000 unique visitors, i.e. 77,000 were re-visits.
    So about 1,750 page-downloads per day, or justabout 1 every 2 seconds on average over the year
• 3.2m in 2011, reported on using:
  • Webalizer (including robots, which appear to be close to 40% of hits)
  • AWStats – Summary and List of URLs (excluding robots)
• 3.5m in 2010, reported on using:
  • Webalizer (partial only, and it doesn't differentiate people from robots)
  • AWStats – Summary and List of URLs
• 3.2m in 2009, comprising 0.36m to 9 Feb, and 2.82m after moving home.
  The reason for the apparent 25% drop in the hit-rate is explained below
  Also AWStats File-Hits for 89% of the year, showing each file's total non-webcrawler hits
  Also AWStats Summary for 89% of the year
• 4.25 million in 2008 (the peak, to date)
• 3.2m in 2007 (I never did work out why it dropped – probably server problems)
• 3.6m in 2006
• 3.2m in 2005
• 2.7m in 2004
• 2.4m in 2003
• 2.3m in 2002 (Here are the Stats for 1995-2002)
• 2.0m in 2001
• 1.6m in 2000
• 1.0m in 1999
• 500,000 in 1998
• 300,000 in 1997
• 200,000 in 1996
• 100,000 in 1994-95

During 2008, a rough indicator of daily activity was 9-13,000 hits, resulting from 500-2,000 visits, by people in 60-80 different countries, hitting about 800-1,000 separate pages.

Last time I looked (quite some time ago), it appeared that between 10,000 and 20,000 pages linked to pages on this site. That's not too bad for one person's narrowly specialised and little-advertised publications. (But I've since switched from the ANU to the rogerclarke.com domain, so many old links will be depending on the redirects I have in place).

A perusal of AWStats suggests that direct hits (i.e. from emails) remains the largest source, but Google has increased (despite a drop in Google PageRank), and hits from embedded links in other sites had also increased:

• the sources of hits in 2009 and 2010 were:
  • 55-60% direct – but only 48% in 2011
  • 10-15% links from other sites (other than search-engines) – 18% in 2011
  • 20-25% links from Google search-engine(s) – 33% in 2011
  • 5-10% links from other search-engines (mainlyYahoo, ahead of Ask, AOL and MS) – down to 2% in 2011
• only 61% of hits were by people – 71% in 2010, 60% in 2011 (whereas my guess had been 80%)
• page-hits were 40-45% of the total hits (i.e. 50-55% were embedded images and similar)
• there were only 2.4 hits per visit (implying that many visitors arrive and leave) – 2.7 in 2010, 2.0 in 2011

The Fiasco of 20 January 2009

This is a story of bouquets and brickbats. Commencing in August 1994, the ANU's IT Services Group hosted this site, and hosted it generally very well. (I was a full-time academic at the ANU 1984-95, and have been a Visiting Fellow, later Visiting Professor, since then).

In late January 2009, I was out of Internet range (walking in the mountains of Tasmania). As a result of an ANU blunder, the site went off-air on 20 Jan 2009. (ANU IT Services had given webmasters of other sites on that server several months' notice that the server was being de-commissioned, but failed to tell the server's biggest user, me). I was unaware of the failure for almost a week, until I was in the lounge at Hobart airport on the way home. As a result of being off-air for a week, the site disappeared entirely out of Google's search-index, and the Google PageRank of 6 was lost.

The ANU accepted that they had to restore the service for a sufficient period to enable conversion and transfer to a new server, and it was available again from 27 Jan 2009; but they gave me short notice to shift the site to a differently-configured service. I had long complained about the ANU's appalling policy that, when a Visiting Professor's appointment expires, support for their web-site is withdrawn, and withdrawn immediately. I therefore chose to move the site to a location where I could be confident about both the level of service and the site's longevity.

I had previously acquired the domains rogerclarke.com and rogerclarke.com.au, but had not made any other plans for a move that I'd assumed was still some years away. During the period 27 Jan to 9 Feb, I had to seek out a suitable ISP, plan and execute the conversion of over a thousand files in varying formats and developed using several generations of templates, run up the new site, install redirects at the ANU site, and re-launch it.

As a result of the ANU blunder:

• 100,000 hits went missing during the 7 days it was off the air and the following 12 days of uncertainty
• even after it was moved, the hit-rate collapsed from an average of 11,500 per day to about 6,000.

It gradually recovered, and several weeks after re-launch, the Google PageRank was back to its previous score of 6.

By the end of 2009, the site was again averaging close to 9,000 hits per day.

To be fair, full recovery was never likely. The ANU was one of the earliest movers in the Web world (as documented in Clarke 2013), continues to offer a great deal of material, and has a Page Rank of 8. So part of the reason that my pages sorted so high in search-engine output was that my site had been benefiting from being a sub-site of the ANU's.

The content and infrastructure for these community service pages are provided by Roger Clarke through his consultancy company, Xamax. From the site's beginnings in August 1994 until February 2009, the infrastructure was provided by the Australian National University. During that time, the site accumulated close to 30 million hits. It passed 40 million by the end of 2012. Sponsored by Bunhybee Grasslands, the extended Clarke Family, Knights of the Spatchcock and their drummer

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Created: 15 February 1995 - Last Amended: 28 March 2013 by Roger Clarke - Site Last Verified: 15 February 2009
This document is at www.rogerclarke.com/Stats.html
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