Traffic

I’ve been interested in where my traffic comes from and how it is growing.

The monthly traffic chart shows that November just barely kept up with October. 

I have heard reports that blog traffic generally was weaker in November than October and I wonder if that’s a trend.  Did the election provide a big boost for blogs that they have had difficulty sustaining since?

Another dynamic that I find interesting is the pattern of traffic on my blog from day to day.  As my blog grew, the pattern was somewhat random.  Popular posts would spike the traffic up.  It was hard to see a pattern. 

But now that the traffic has settled down, at least for now, I see a very predictable pattern.  Monday’s traffic is the highest.  It slopes down each day after that with a trough on the weekend, and then it starts all over again.

I guess the Monday spike results from the readers who don’t read on the weekend and come back to work on Monday and get caught up.  But the slide from Tuesday to Friday is less understandable.

A quick look at the Gawker sites’ traffic patterns show some of this flatness in growth and similar weekly trends on the more mature blogs.

I’d be curious if others see the same patterns in their traffic.