What Google Trends Says about LJ's Russian traffic

[charmian]

If Google Trends is to be believed, LJ now has more Russian traffic than U.S. traffic.

I was poking around Compete and Alexa looking at stats, and when I saw that Alexa.com said that 33.6% of LJ visitors were Russian vs. 21.5% of visitors being American, I wondered whether that could be true. However, the Alexa stats did not differentiate by country.

Fortunately, I discovered Google Trends, which does, and which painted an interesting picture.

If you look at the global stats, over the past two years, LJ has declined from around a million daily unique visitors to a bit over 500K daily unique visitors.

However, you notice looking down that Russia is the top country mentioned, and we can view Russian stats separately. Over the past two years, there have been around 400K-300K daily visitors.

And, we can also view the U.S. stats separately: Over the past two years, LJ's daily visitors have decreased by over 50%. Over the past twelve months, LJ's daily visitors have declined from around 200K to 100K. (Interestingly, stats for Canada have mirrored this, about 1/10th of the U.S.'s size, yet following a similar pattern)

So if Google Trends is to be believed, in a day around as many Americans visit LJ as Ukrainians visit LJ.

Google Ad Planner had more stats
Here are the global stats for LJ.

The U.S. stats: it claims that LJ has around 7.4 million unique cookies and 3.5 million users from the U.S.

Here are the Russian stats: 8.2M unique visitors according to cookies, 5.6M users.

Ukraine's stats: Confusingly, although it is claimed that the daily visitors for Ukraine and U.S. are similar, there are only around 2-1.8 million monthly unique visitors.


What do you make of all this?

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Can I link to this from meta_lj?

[charmian]

Sure!

[foxfirefey]

Linked this one and the previous one, because they both were interesting and informative about the same topic!

http://community.livejournal.com/meta_lj/909.html
http://livejournal-meta.dreamwidth.org/353.html

[charmian]

Cool. Heh, you have any opinions on it?

[foxfirefey]

I am currently still thinking about it! Although I think a lot of my impressions are from things I've already thought about--I didn't know that Russian traffic had eclipsed US traffic. I do have some thought forming, though, about feature conservatism.

[charmian]

Hmm, do you think that this development is potentially connected in any way to feature conservatism?

[foxfirefey]

I think LJ users are less feature conservative than may be expected given the amount of caterwauling one encounters in news comments. And I think half of the caterwauling is based on a history of awkwardly implemented features and decisions, making some people once bit and twice shy.

LJ doesn't know how to promote or explain new features in a way that entices users--take for instance the recent search feature, which is better than most people seem to think it is, but which LJ didn't really explain what its advantages were. Same thing happened with pingbacks, I think. New features often start out poorly documented in English, with the docs volunteers having very little direct assistance from the company on what features actually do. LJ also promotes partnerships and revenue producing referrals as features, even if they're not quite up to snuff. For instance, the Blurb partnership was supposed to let users buy books of their journals, but the software was clumsy and not well integrated with LiveJournal. They have a partnership with Live Messenger to provide IM capacity on the site, but it required signing up with another account, consenting to promotional spam from MS Live and Bing, and is lagging and buggy compared to Facebook's. Or there's the Your Money, Your Ads thing that doesn't pay out enough to benefit most users. I remember the Gizmo partnership that went nowhere and fell through years ago.

Some features, like Notes, are fairly well done and met with general praise. But I think overall, new LJ features have become kind of a pessimistic affair. I think there's a lot of features, little and big, that could reinforce loyalty on the US side. Currently, a lot of features start out being developed for the Russian market, where they have lots of insight on what the users want and need, and then ported over to the US side, because they might as well since most of the work was already done.

[charmian]

Why is it better than most people think it is? I figured it out mostly simply from looking at it. IMHO, pingbacks were not very well implemented, meaning the feature itself is kind of questionably implemented.

Huh, meaning that they need to hire someone who can write news posts better? I think partnerships can be valid, though, but the chat thing would have been FAR better done as an internal feature.

Yeah, sounds like how they do things.

[foxfirefey]

I think a lot of people never bothered going to the advanced tab, and since it wasn't described, they didn't know it had features using site:livejournal.com on google didn't. Granted, that's probably for a small subset of savvy Internet types.

Partnerships can be valid! The Last.fm one seems to work out okay, and as far as I know the PhotoBucket one works just fine. The Moo promotion seemed to go over well. Some partnerships, like the Blurb one, had potential but were ruined by bad implementations.

I'm kind of on the fence about the chat thing. I think doing a good chat probably takes a lot of developer effort. Facebook can afford throwing manpower at that task much more than LJ. I couldn't find a single good open source implementation of such a beast based on Jabber (which would hook up nicely with their existing LJTalk), so that wasn't a good option either. As far as I can see, it was integrate with a company like MS who'd already done most of the gruntwork, or not do it at all, because it would have taken too much developer time. And maybe there are people that use it? Just because I don't know about them doesn't mean they don't exist, I guess.

[charmian]

Seems they're still revising it.

True, but is the MS one really a good chat? And chat is like social networking: something that is only useful if a lot of people are using it. Doing it like this only seems to increase the risk of a lot of people not using it.

I don't know much about the mechanics, but was this the only way they could have integrated chat into the site? Couldn't they have not done it like FB does, but instead had a section of the site dedicated to chat rooms or something?

[foxfirefey]

I think you're right and that they might have been able to do something like that, but that doesn't integrate well with casual browsing of the site. Problem was, often there's quite the lag time between the time you go to another page and the time the messenger finally loads. When it started out, you'd lose you windows, too, so it pretty much was stay put if you were talking--they might have fixed that by now. FB's is near instant and persistant.

It does do one useful thing aside from being a chat mechanism--it also hooks into the notification system. That was probably the best thing about LJTalk, too, not so much that other people were on there to talk with (though some of my friends were!), but that if I wanted to keep *right* on top of something, I could have certain notifications sent to my IM. Never did learn the posting syntax, though.

[charmian]

True... although, if you could embed such chats into journal entries, that might have helped. (Kind of like shoutboxing, also). I didn't use it, but the behavior you describe about the lag does sound really annoying.

I tried using LJtalk back in the day, but no one I knew used it, so there was no reason to use it any more.

BTW, I was looking at changelog the other day and saw something about a "virus game." I wonder if it's some kind of newfangled virus protection/anti-malware thing or is LJ going to try get into mini-games.

[foxfirefey]

I think LJTalk was most used among people with multi-IM clients, they just added it and it would sign them in with the rest of their accounts.

From the "invited, active" description in the chart, my guess is it's some kind of game or meme thing.

[charmian]

Heh, at that time, I was using a multi-IM client, but I still didn't end up using it.

Weird; they never had games before. The virus name sounds a tad ominous though. I hope whatever it is, it doesn't end up being annoying if they port it to the English side.

[jd]

I know I'm late coming in, but from the lj-releases posts from the past few weeks, it seems to be some sort of memetic game for Russian users only.

[charmian]

Thanks for the info! I wonder what form it will take..

[jd]

The posting syntax has been included in the LJ Talk FAQ now, by the way (which has been significantly updated, hopefully to be more useful).

[starlady]

Having read your previous post on LJ.ru, it seems from the statistics that SUP's resource allocation decisions make a lot of sense. That said, though, it's my sense anecdotally that development for the English-language side has been ramping up over the past year or so, so maybe there's a virtuous circle going on?

That is an ugly and dramatic drop in users from a corporate perspective. I guess the question is what SUP wants out of its visitors--are they aiming for sheer numbers, or for getting visitors to spend more time on-site, or what?

[charmian]

Hmm, who knows? I don't really have much insight into the development. It seems that most of the big things have been unveiled on both the Russian and Eng. sides. Much of the stuff, like fighting spam, is universal.

Well, I'm sure they want both. Hard to see what SUP is doing on the U.S. side. So far, it seems like they're moving to non-advertisement monetization (a la the CSI video game contest)

[zorkian]

What you call that "non-advertisement" I call "blatant advertisement to everybody, even paid accounts who paid not to see this crap".

[charmian]

Sorry, I guess I should have been more clear when trying to differentiate it from the ads shown on basic/plus journals.

[zorkian]

No worries, I just find it amusing how different people look at things. I fought that a bunch at Six Apart. "This isn't an ad, it's a value-added-sponsored-thingamajig!" Actually, sorry, it's an advertisement. It may be less bad than other ads, sure, but it's still an ad!

Anyway, your posts are interesting and I enjoy reading them. Please don't take my comments as any form of criticism as they're not.

[charmian]

Yeah, I should have been more clear.

Cool, no offense taken.

[foxfirefey]

They have definitely been trying to diversify from banner ads for a long while now. Sponsored communities, sponsored mood themes, sponsored layouts, sponsored Writer's Blocks and other contests, partnerships that involve kickbacks such as Peanut Lab Surveys or this thing with Google Ads on paid journals that generate referral fees. The Russian side even has a discount club shopping page thing!

The interesting thing about the CSI contest is that instead of creating a sponsored community, LJ had the existing maintainer of a large and popular community post about the promotion. It's a lot more savvy and effective, I imagine, than when they create sponsored communities from scratch and try and get people to join them.

[charmian]

Yeah, they have. There are also sponsored journals (users get the benefits of a paid journal in exchange for having a specific company sponsor their journal).

Oh, where was it? I didn't see the discount club.

This seems to be the third one so far, after the Sims and the Xbox ones. (Did you see my post about the Sims one?)

[foxfirefey]

I did not! But now I went back and saw it. Was the XBox one like that? I only remember the sponsored community for that one, but it's very possible they also advertised in existing comms.

It's hard for me to find right now--and it's possible it doesn't exist anymore, it was something I observed a year or two ago. Right now there's a charity drive thingie, thoug,h I think.

[charmian]

Yep, it was also done in an existing comm.

I doesn't seem to be on lj.ru. Yeah,it's a children's charity; I think I posted about it on the post about the Russian side of LJ.

[petronia]

LJ daily traffic was holding pretty steady til May-June 2008 - was there anything that happened at that point, do you remember? Or is it a matter of other sites gaining traction?

[charmian]

In May-June there was that whole LJ elections thing, but since most users ignored it, I think it's more of a matter of correlation than causation. My gut tells me that it's connected to FB and Twitter and other sites more than anything else than anything LJ did in particular, though. But we don't really know which sectors were the ones where traffic dropped off, so we can't really know.