Google Trends on LJ

[charmian]

Hmm, this chart. I don't know if Google Trends's numbers are to be trusted (though I've heard some people saying they are fairly accurate in a broad sense), but if they are true, in March 2010 LJ had around 500K daily U.S visitors, and in March 2011, LJ had around 250K, meaning about half. Not sure what caused the drastic Feb 2011 downturn though. Anyway, I wonder what we're going to see come March 2012.

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=livejournal.com&geo=US&date=ytd&sort=0

In other news, congratulations to Dreamwidth on leaving Beta.

Comments

[synecdochic]

To the best of my knowledge, Feb '11 is when they started really cracking down on spambots. It's entirely possible those 250k visitors lost were entirely the traffic caused by spammers.

[charmian]

Ah, thanks! That would explain some things. If that is true... then wow, that is a lot of spam traffic.

[synecdochic]

Spam traffic on LJ has been fucking insane for a really long time. I would easily estimate that over half of LJ's 'active users' stats are spammers; the Latest page is nearly 100% spam at any point I've loaded it in the past year. Now, obviously 'real' users are more likely to opt out of the Latest page, but still...

If I were feeling really curious I'd do a random-user walk and note down the percentages, but I think on LJ it's still "random registered user", not "random active user" like it is on DW, and the numbers would be skewed.

[matgb]

If I were feeling really curious I'd do a random-user walk and note down the percentages, but I think on LJ it's still "random registered user", not "random active user" like it is on DW, and the numbers would be skewed.

TBH, a three-way count--"active person", "spammer", "inactive person" count would be an interesting stat anyway, but it's not something I'd want to spend time doing.

[charmian]

Hmmn, I guess it might be possible to create a program which would do that, but probably no one would really care to try.