Site statistics

Published article count was 20 in May, down from 32 in April. Published comments were 822 in May, down from 1119 in April. 

We didn’t publish 21 abusive, content-free or incomprehensible comments in May, including a few from when Eliot tried our patience (more than ten comments in one day) : total comments intended for publication and not published: 21/843=2.5%.

Excluding search crawlers, robots and other non-human visitors, 30,994 people visited the site in May and looked at 332,000 pages, up again from 27,500 unique visitors in April. Because each page has multiple elements, this comes up in Awstats as more than 1.3 million hits, plus another quarter million from bots (a third of those Googlebot).

I've been doing a bit of analysis on how these visitors come to us. As has been true pretty much since the site's inception, most of the pages read on the site are either addressed directly (71% of page views), or via a search engine (24%, almost all Google). Apart from "webdiary" itself, the search terms involved were incredibly varied, with no one term causing more than two hundred  inbound visits, and the only terms close to that being "julia perry" (?), "bill henson" and "arie brand" (?).

That leaves the 5% who came referred from another site. This is also extraordinarily varied, being divided over nearly 900 source sites. The only referees sourcing more than 25 visits were from stumbleupon, edge.org and ar15.com, all to the Oil Dollar Euro ULP article, and totalling 600 or so visitors between them.

Each weekday around 2000 people visit the site (around 1300 on a weekend day). Less than half of those (probably drawn from those who came in via searches) make that one visit and move on, and more than half come back again (within the same month - the "unique" count resets at the beginning of each month). Obviously some of you come back more than a few times. Around 60 of you in any month log in to make comments, the thousands of others just read - and hopefully enjoy.

Finances

As in most recent months, cash income in May was $30 in donations, versus expenditure of $13 for bank fees. Cash in the bank at end April was $2,514.67. May Google ad revenue was US$17, accumulated unreceived total is US$81 - Adsense pays out when this reaches US$100.