Monday was the 4th birthday of Broadsheet and as is tradition, I bring you some stats from the last year. As usual, these all come from Google Analytics and cover from 29th of July 2013 to 28th of July 2014.
The Headline Figures
- New users up 3% to 24% of visitors
- Users up 6.5% to 3.2m from 3m
- Pagviews down 14.5% from 32.5m to 27.8m
- Screenviews stand at 20.5m
So why the drop in pageviews?
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 You Reading?
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 You Riled Up About?
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:
Where Did You Hear About us?
62% of the referral traffic comes from Facebook alone. They have firmly placed themselves as the distribution channel of choice for many people. Each change they make to how posts appear in news feeds has a massive and very visible impact. The last few changes have been massively detrimental to site like Broadsheet that can’t afford to pay Facebook to reach people who’ve already ‘liked’ the Broadsheet feed.
Twitter takes up 23% of the remaining referral traffic, which is less than the traffic coming from just the Facebook Mobile site.
Everything after the big two provide only tiny scraps of traffic.
The top five search terms (with the usual variations on broadsheet.ie removed) that brought people to the site were:
- teletubbies
- justin timberlake phoenix park
- vikings
- forbiddem fruit 2012 pictures
- judge nolan
I’m at a loss to explain the teletubbies one. After three years appearing in the top five, ‘niamh horan’ has slipped down to sixth. I almost feel like it’s an end of an era.
The Window You Look At The Internet Through
Chrome is the absolute king, with 44.5% (up 6%) of all pages viewed on it. this gain was mainly at the expense of both Internet Explorer (dropped 3% to 14.5%) and Firefox (down 4% to 17%). Safari stayed relatively stable at 14% (a 0.5% drop).
The other browser that gained share was the Safari in-app browser (i.e. if you view Broadsheet from with an app like Facebook or Tweetbot etc.) which is up 2% to 5%.
IE 6 and 7 are near extinction, with less than 1/2% of pagesviews from them. IE 8 though is still the most used of those browsers, although it is declining in favour of IE 10 and 11.
When it comes to whats powering the machines people are using, Windows still holds 50% (albeit that’s down 9%). iOS has overtaken OS X for second place with 21% (up 9%) compared to 15.5% (down 5%) followed by Android which has doubled to 10%. The rest is made up of a smattering of Linux, Chrome OS, Symbian Os and Windows Phone.
Mobile Apps
- 5,325 (for a total of 29,901) on iOS
- 4,555 (for a total of 6,819) on Android
- 1,829 (for a total of 3,200) on Windows Phone
OS wise, only about 6% of installs are on a version of Android under 4.0, which is great news for me as I can aim the app to be 4.0+ plus in the next iteration. The downloads for it are a little disappointing but on the flip side, the app isn’t great and does next a bit of love and attention.
On iOS, less than 4% of active users in the last month had some version of iOS 6 on their device. Again, this is great new for me as it means I can drop support for 6 with minimal impact.
Where Are You Based These Days?
Unsurprisingly, there’s no change here. Visitors predominately come from Ireland (74%) followed by the UK (10%), US (4%), Germany (1%), Australia (1%) and then everyone else makes up the other 10%.
Anything Else?
If there’s anything else you’d like to know about, ask in the comments and I’ll see what I can dig out.
Previously:
Broadsheet Yearly Stats 3: We’re getting a bit old in the tooth now.
A Broadsheet New Year
Broadsheet – Entering the Terrible Twos
A year in the Broadsheet
