Walking statgasm Karl Monaghan

Further to our fourth birthday yesterday.

*wipes cake crumbs*

“Karl, year four…give it to us straight, no chaser…”

New users up 3% to 24% of visitors
Users up 6.5% to 3.2m from 3m
Pageviews down 14.5% from 32.5m to 27.8m
Screenviews stand at 20.5m

“So why the drop in pageviews? Nice whistle.”

Thanks. It looks like the mobile apps are cannibalising the desktop site.

This is in part due to the an Android app finally getting released, but also because of the ongoing trend across the web of the growth in traffic from mobile apps.

I don’t have a full year of stats for the 2012/2013 to compare mobile usage with but with a bit of hand wavying estimations based on the 5 months of data I do have, there’s about a 25% increase in screenviews. If I combined the 20.5m screenviews (which are setup to be the equivalent of a pageview on the desktop site) between the iOS and Android apps to the desktop, you get about 12% growth year on year.

Outside of the apps while the traffic from mobile has increased by 5% to 16% of the total pageviews to 3.3m. Tablet usage just increased 1% to 793K.

iOS powered devices still deliver 2 pageviews to every 1 from an Android device.

Samsung dominates the top 50 devices used with 23 models (although some are variants on the same handset). Sony has 6, HTC weighs in with 5, Apple and Nokia have 4 each and Google just 2.

“What are people Reading? Sure about the brown shoes?”

Yes, As has always been the case, about half of all pageviews are the front page of the site. The top posts more represent what people have commented on or shared, since the stories are published in full when you’re looking at the home page.

11,464 post were published over the course of the last year. The top five by pageviews were:

Staying Alive
‘The Mask Is Off And People Know’
Who Is He?
Dear RTÉ
What Your Electric Guitar Says About You

Interestingly, three of the stories (‘The Mask Is Off And People Know’, Who Is He? and Dear RTÉ) were only published in the last week, while What Your Electric Guitar Says About You is nearly two years old. These are both perfect examples of the two ways posts become huge.

The recent stories are (obviously) very current and immediate. People are sharing and commenting one them as they’re igniting people’s passions. The guitar post, on the other hand, is one that has enduring interest and every so often gets spread around forums and gets shared on Facebook again and again.

The fact that four of the top five posts are rather serious content (a trend that extends to the top 25 posts of the year) is a possible indication of a more serious tone on the site or that people are more inclined to share the more serious material.

“What are the subjects causing comment, heated debate and often FIGHTS?

There’s been 192,170 comments from 10,117 commenters. Of these, 21 commenters have posted over 1,000 comments each and responsible for 45,688 between them.

The five most commented posts were:

Taking It Back
Staying Alive
Caring For The Pigeons
The Traveller Card
Extreme Canvassing

“Thanks Karl.”

Don’t mention it. It’s my duty.

“Thanks in anyhow.”

MORE DETAILED ANALYSIS: Broadsheet Year 4 (Karl Monaghan)