Global Culture

Having a growing readership is very important to me. Knowing that people return to the blog after their first visit tells me the discussion continues to be relevant. The curse of technology is that there are many different metrics that attempt to provide an idea of how well a site is doing: pageviews, unique visitors, and a few others; however deciding how to interpret the numbers is critical to decide on future growth strategies. I’ve settled for a combination of 3 groups of readers and a measurement for each one, obtaining the following graph for the performance of this blog since inception:

• Feed Subscribers: these are visitors that will keep coming back for more. Since the number varies day to day, I take the maximum number for each month. This accounts for the fact that not all subscribers read their feeds every day, but when they all do, you get the best snapshot of their size. Since they are reading every article I multiply their number by the total number of posts in a given month. This number is equivalent to each one of them visiting the site once to read each article. They are the most sophisticated group and know how to use tools such as Google Reader, Bloglines and a number of other applications to keep a certain discipline when reading their blogs. If you’re not in this group yet, just Subscribe Now.
• Returning Visitors: these are only those visits by visitors who had been to the blog before. They are important to me because the fact that they came back indicates they are likely interested in the content. While nothing can guarantee that they will come back, they probably have made a note about the site. If you come back often to this blog but haven’t done so, you can Bookmark This Site
• Other Readers: Those users that have just discovered the blog (first visit), but spent over 10 seconds are my final group. While they may not come back again, the fact that they invested time suggests that there is interest.

The readership of this blog is growing an average of 50% month after month. Our first year anniversary approaches fast and I’m confident we’ve reached momentum to start kicking off some of the other aspects of this project.