Some AVC Stats
Mario Cantin asked me to post some stats on the AVC readership in the comments to yesterday’s post. So here is some data from Google Analytics, Disqus, Feedblitz (which powers the daily email), and Feedburner.
Here are the high level google analytics stats for avc.com for the past twelve months:
That works out to be about 240,000 sessions per month and the average number of users per month is about 180,000. New visitors represent about 50% of visitors so about 750,000 visitors in the past year have come to avc.com at least once before.
There is a loyal readership that reads via email (using feedblitz). The total email subscribers right now is 10,972. These people read the daily post in their email and often reply to me via email and generally don’t participate in the comments.
There is also a RSS audience though it is relatively small. Feedburner provides these stats:
The 14,804 total RSS subs number includes the 10,972 that subscribe via email via Feedblitz. I power Feedblitz via my RSS feed via Feedburner. The “reach” number is the daily number of people who actually read the post. That’s about 60%. The people who subscribe via email or RSS are truly regulars although they don’t visit the website and they normally don’t comment.
If you buy that reach number, then roughly 8,500 people a day read AVC via email or RSS. That is about the same number as the daily sessions on AVC. So I’ve generally assumed a daily readership of around 15,000 people.
The commenter community is much smaller. Over the past year, 4,036 people have commented on AVC and have left a total of 46,100 comments (an average of 126 comments a day). Certainly a lot more people than that read the comments, but I don’t have a number for that group.
The geographic distribution of people who visit avc.com (a subset of the total audience) looks like this:
I’ve been told a number of times that avc.com is blocked in China but I have never verified that and it may not be true now or in the past. If it is true, I am very proud of that fact.
Here are the top cities and countries:
All I have to say about this list is “fuck yeah Buenos Aires”.
I just turned on demographics yesterday so this data is brand new and only reflects yesterday. I will publish it again after a few months as one day of traffic may not be representative (you can click on the image to see it in a larger form):
The avc.com readership is young and male. No surprises there. The 19% female audience something I don’t feel great about and hope to change over time. I got some great suggestions on how to do that yesterday in the comments.
That’s about it for now. I hope you enjoyed this data dump. I try to do this once a year but Mario said he’s been reading AVC for over a year and hadn’t seen a post like this in his “tenure”. So we’ve fixed that now.
Comments (Archived):
“These people read the daily post in their email and often reply to me via email and generally don’t participate in the comments.”Sounds like an opportunity for DisqusAs for attracting a larger female audience, you could always try Celebrity Gossip Tuesdays.
Oh Andy!Although “celebrity” is relative. Entrepreneurs are my celebrities. And a few VCs.
the same thing happens with my blog/email newsletter. lots of people reply to the email because, let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to reply to an email on your phone than leave a disqus comment on your phone. i wish there was a way to translate those email replies into comments.
+1 on translating those emails to comments
Photo is of Jessica Alba, co-founder of Honest Company and a celebrity.Plus here’s a list of women under 30 who may read celebrity gossip AND ARE ALSO FOUNDING AND DOING IMPORTANT WORK IN TECH:* http://www.businessinsider….Who knows, your daughter may end up joining their ranks — not the racks, :*).And physical objectification works both ways now (google Kit Harrington of ‘Game of Thrones’ complaints about it: http://time.com/3765148/kit….
Absolutely! My daughter is already on the right track…
That’s fantastic! I mean swantastic!
This is very likable 🙂
her application letter was way way better. Very Very professional of her. (though someone needs to explain she’s being paid under the minimum wage :p )
Plus here’s a list of women under 30 who may read celebrity gossip AND ARE ALSO FOUNDING AND DOING IMPORTANT WORK IN TECHAlways interesting when people decide what they are doing is important or worthy and what others are doing is trivial and frivolous.Celebrity gossip is entertainment (and bonds people together) and some people (men and women) enjoy that. No different than couch watching and/or talking about sports, watching movies, talking about politics, dining at new restaurants weekly, obsessing and masturbating over minutia in technical matters that really don’t matter.By the way the ad next to the Alba picture (nice dress she is wearing) indicates that you have been thinking about retirement and that you or have been in the UK.
Haha and that’s an example of how RUBBISH ad targeting is.I’m going to be like the Henry Kissinger / George Soros of the tech sector. Those guys NEVER RETIRE.
That’s the great thing about being in business vs. sports or being Jessica Alba. You get better with age and you can participate and have (and this is important) fun until the day that you die. [1][1] That’s why I think that Bill Gates had some kind of a strange health (or mental) related change of life. Business people like that typically don’t retire in their 50’s from what they are doing and what they love. (Ditto for politicians) [2] Perhaps it was his wife Melinda hocking him (I remember thinking when his relationship with her hit the front page of the WSJ how it was going to change him..)[2] Having such smoke blown up your ass all of the time is a powerful drug. Why would you want to stop having that addicting force each and everyday and not matter to anyone anymore (to the same degree I mean).
Yeah, that’ll about do it.
Hahaha that’s weird and fantastic
It’s a CC 2.0 photo, credit: https://www.flickr.com/phot…
Well played 🙂
omg Troll dolls
Say ‘celebrity gossip’ again.
Reality TV!?
Or, http://gph.is/RHJ7KD?tc=1
> Larger?Fred only said:”The 19% female audience something I don’t feel great about and hope to change over time.”Maybe he meant smaller? :-)!I agree I’d like the female audience to be larger, especially if they have good recipes for soft, warm, oatmeal and raisin cookies! I’m no good at baking good cookies and need help! 🙂
I promise, all it is is chemistry (people here have my cookies)
I promise, all it is is chemistry (people here have my cookies) I told myself that many times. Since I made A’s in college chemistry, I should be able to cook, right?Nope! Why? My explanation has been that the media on cooking — books, magazines, TV, Web sites, video clips, blogs — have been run overwhelmingly by traditional media people who believe first in light entertainment and that based almost totally on traditional techniques of story telling, e.g., with a protagonist with a problem and, then, a solution.The entertainment part is from members of the audience identifying with the protagonist and feeling good when the protagonist is successful, mostly in the sense that the protagonist gets praise, acceptance, friendship from others he is serving the food to.So, the whole effort of the material, supposedly on cooking, is to create an experience for the members of the audience, just the experience, from just the story telling, and not from the food that members of the audience cook.So, the media producers, directors, writers, editors, etc. want material about cooking to be vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE).Well those media people may like prose, poetry, story telling, etc., but they don’t like measurements and would really hate chemistry. To them any mention of measurements would seriously distract from the VEFEEE.E.g., yesterday I saw a piece at Business Insider that purported to give instructions on how to make the best hamburger. Yes, the story ended with a claim that he got lots of praise from friends. Yup, the story made what to do look really simple. Right, the story omitted how much each hamburger patty weighed in ounces or grams just before cooking and what the internal temperature in degrees F or C was just after cooking.So, the article was intended to be just VEFEEE. Any connection with readers being able to do better cooking hamburgers was irrelevant.Early on those media people fooled me: From their contents, I wasted lots of time, money, effort, and calories trying to cook dishes of wide variety, American, French, Italian, German, Chinese.I tried Beef Bourguignon often enough to use up ingredients enough to feed the Russian army through Leningrad, Stalingrad, and the march back to Berlin, with enough good red wine to wash it down with. All I got was garbage. Horrible stuff.Ah, there’s US BBQ! Major parts of the country are nearly saturated with some really serious US cooks who take their BBQ really seriously. Usually these people have zip, zilch, and zero interest in, plus a lot of angry contempt for, the cherished belle lettre of some Vassar graduate editor of The Atlantic. Ah, American know how! Instead, these US BBQ devotees just insist on rock solid, highly detailed information. Good. Information. At last!So, from writing about US BBQ, I learned that, except for maybe some surface Malliard reactions (1) the main purpose of cooking beef is just to melt out the collagen; (2) collagen melts starting at about 160 F; (3) except for the collagen, the rest of beef, e.g., the proteins in the muscle fibers, are always tender, juicy, and succulent; (4) do not heat the proteins over 180 F for very long or they will shrink, expel their water, and become permanently hard and dry; (5) under no circumstances let the beef come near boiling at 212 F.So, sure, didn’t have to wait long for yet another VEFEEE article on cooking from the NYT, yes, on Beef Bourguignon. Yes, it was to be easy! Just do these and those little things, and then let it “simmer” until delicious, succulent, etc.Haw! Won’t happen! Just for a real test, once I let it “simmer” for 96 hours! It never got succulent. What went wrong? Never say simmer. Instead, say, measure the temperature and keep it over 160 F to melt the collagen and maintain food safety and keep it nicely under 180 F to remain succulent. That’s one of the secrets.But that’s not part of VEFEEE!But VEFEEE and Beef Bourguignon are a story where really bad things happen to really good ingredients and diligent readers extract hard won, miserable defeat from the jaws of easy, magnificent victory. Ah, drama! But that’s what VEFEEE is all about drama, not cooking. And that’s what cooking in the NYT is for, Vicarious food and then getting carry out at McDonald’s!In those cooking trials, occasionally I got good results but in that case nearly always needed lots of trials, to add points of my own, and to keep notes to be used later.I suspect that eventually the Internet will change this situation, that is, have, in addition to the story telling, content on cooking that is actually effectively instructional.And hopefully they will mention relevant chemistry! Gee, where can I buy a constant temperature water bath, a pH meter, a viscosity meter, etc.? Ah, let’s really go for it — gas chromatography, mass spectrometer, molecular spectroscopy. Get some Perkin-Elmer equipment, do some group representations (my undergraduate honors paper) for the quantum mechanics. etc.!Gee, if I set up lab building out back with all that stuff, DHS, FBI, DEA, CIA, NSA, etc. would likely come and knock my doors in and pin me against the wall. And all I was trying to do was find the right pH for whipping egg whites, adding lemon juice to a hot custard sauce, making the best Caesar salad dressing, making the best custard base for coconut cream pie and old chocolate ice box pie, and understanding the Malliard reactions in BBQ! Ah, waste of time — Myhrvold already did that and wrote it up!
This assumes we all read celebrity gossip. I could point out that tech has its own form of celebrity gossip…
It makes no such assumption at all. It assumes (correctly) that the group “women” is more likely to click on articles about celebrity gossip than about venture tech. I am willing to bet all that I have that TMZ stats show a higher % of women than AVC. You’re making my point. That maybe Fred should think of his audience as a collection of individuals rather than in buckets of demographics to be courted.
Any CloudFlare stats? For example, bandwidth saved or threats stopped?
I’ve never looked
You might want to consider having some mention of that “threats stopped/bandwidth saved” right smack on your home landing page. [1] [2]That point isn’t really made until “overview” where it says this:We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources.And just like Fred never thought about it, you might want to also send users a periodic non-annoying email stating that “x thousand threats were stopped in the last 3 weeks to your website and N bandwidth was saved by using cloudflare”. If you are not going to toot your horn nobody is going to do it for you or know the benefits that they are receiving.[1] Maybe even a cheesy counter..[2] For that matter the video takes way to much screen space on your homepage and the “supercharge” really is to general and ignorable to matter as a marketing message.
Wow, you don’t do things halfway!I had guessed 10,000 and up to 20,000 of serious daily readers so that was in the ballpark, but the Google Analytics numbers are seven figure. That’s sure moving the needle.I find the variance of the various numbers very informative.Thanks!
I feel like I say this to Fred every year he publishes his stats, but that 1.5M yearly user number is not very meaningful. Unless GA made a major change recently, unique users in GA and most analytics tools can really only be trusted for a ~30 day period, and even then are usually inflated bc they are just counting cookies.
Absolutely, but it’s just one additional metric to put things into context if you understand that. And the bounce rate corroborates your point.
The only group as far as I know who doesn’t count cookies is IBM. Unless you have a new name?
Oslo, RSS-feed young male regular reader and seldom commenter here. Fascinating stats, looking forward to next year’s post!Sidenote: I love RSS feeds, and I sorely miss Google Reader (although Feedly is a decent replacement). While I can see how RSS readers weren’t necessarily a good thing for (ad-based) content providers, I never understood why RSS use declined from a consumer standpoint. Having all my feeds in one place, uncluttered by social media white noise, with a read/unread flag is still the most practical way of consuming content I’ve found.
Second that, from another RSS reader. It baffles me as well that the use of this simple feature has declined so precipitously. I, too, miss Google Reader and am making do with Feedly. Sigh…
I’ve long felt that somehow an opportunity was missed with RSS. I’m curious, why do you find Feedly inferior to Google Reader? What in particular do you miss about GR?
They are functionally almost equal, but I do miss the “mark unread” option which was very useful when I opened an article but realized I didn’t have time to read it. In general I find the Feedly interface to be slightly less intuitive (for instance, there’s no hover tooltip on the buttons, and I don’t understand all the icons). Also, Feedly is somewhat buggy (crashes my browser, and doesn’t always update the “number of unread items” when I read something.)
Thanks 🙂
I don’t know if Feedly is inferior, but I find it busy. I miss the simplicity of Reader.
I also love my RSS reader, though signing up for email notifications of new content is a distant second best way of being notified of great content on my schedule, and is far easier to implement from the consumer side.I use newsblur.
Just landed Shanghai. Can’t open avc.com without VPN. So seems like it is blocked in here.
that’s interesting
That liiiiittle dot at the end of Africa…..that’s me 🙂 Great blog, great stats.
Yay for you!
Yay indeed.
Yessssss
Hi Africa (but I am guessing you are not alone)
I may have been a factor as well – I was in South Africa for the past two weeks for work (Jo’burg).
I must be contributing to some percentage of the 85K visits (or visitors?) from India, since I come here daily 🙂 – because there are good posts and comments.
Fred,I’ve been reading a daily email via IFTTT. I’m not sure if those are in your stats as I rarely pull up the actual site, but read most of your daily posts.Thanks for your insights,Richard
Hi! I take it that you don’t usually comment. If so, what made you decide to do so?
If its RSS its in the feedburner numbers
Yes AVC is blocked in China. Ive never been able to access without VPN.
I see AVC in email and immediately go to my browser to get the comments version. Not sure how or when I discovered that there were comments, but my life has never been the same since.From the female and Los Angeles numbers I see that my work here is not yet done. Yet, the number of women commenting has definitely increased since I first arrived in 2009. You should be proud of that!Although for me personally it’s actually kind of cool to have a place to regularly hear the perspectives of young males and I’ve made some great acquaintances that I may not have ordinarily. But yeah we could use more diversity. If anyone can do it, it’s you.
Wow BA must having a thriving startup community based on these stats. What other S American cities are known for tech and startups? I’ve managed dev teams from Sao Paolo so I know the talent there and have anecdotally heard about Medellin.
Huge traffic, yet the feeling is somehow personal, like a niche and not-so-very-well-known blog. You are inclined to just comment, or say something in a conversation. But whenever I submit, it always feels like “oops…, it’s going to a huge traffic!”. Oops.
Long running meme that AVC is a salon or a neighbourhood bar, due to the talent of the Bartender. Most neighbourhood pubs don’t have this many patrons!
yet the feeling is somehow personal”Cast of Characters”. So that might be a result of the fact that there are frequent commenters who often dominate and standout in a high ratio compared to the occasional remarks of others. [1] The sitcom effect if you want to call it that.[1] One way to enhance this would be to put together a Playbill which describes the general temperament and attitude of a particular frequent commenter so new readers of AVC didn’t have to spend so much time getting up to speed or understanding the context, [2] I first thought about this in the 80’s when Howard Stern came on in Philly and I had no clue about all of the inside things that everyone else was laughing about. [3][2] ie “JLM always pimps Austin Tx, patriotism, loves his red convertible, and slams Obama..”.[3] I probably stopped listening to Stern at least 20 years ago…
An attempt expanding on point [2] using the same format, excluding Jeff as he has already been included above- LE always comes from the direction of the edge case or the exception [1]- JimHirshfield always has a quip or two- awaldstein always has something interesting for me- FAKEGRIMLOCK WAS ALWAYS ALL CAPS – [1] LE always has atleast one footnote in every blog post I have readBaton to the others now…
LE always comes from the direction of the edge case or the exceptionIn the past week the following has happened to me:1) A deer jumped through the window and trashed my neighbors office. I had just installed tempered glass on the inside of my windows (for sound deadening and security purposes) fearing a possible animal intrusion (and because I hate the noise from the outside). I feel totally vindicated for being cautious and thinking of an edge case and security.2) The ceiling just collapsed (50 minutes ago!) in a rental unit that I just bought last month. The previous owner had put in a bucket above the ceiling to catch a water drip instead of repairing it. When the bucket filled with water because of the recent rain the weight collapsed the ceiling tile and came crashing down in a Psychiatrist’s office.That is just what happened in the past week. Just in case you are wondering why I think of exceptions or edge cases…..
The famous rule is, “If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst time for you.”
That is the beauty of the edge cases – our biggest lessons, successes, failures, opportunities, memories happen when we either consciously delve into the edge of routine or when it is thrust upon usI daresay, it is Routine which helps us stand, but the Exceptions which temper us to walk farp.s- You did mention you stayed a bit away from the city but didn’t realise it involved deers knocking on doors & windows!
“fuck yeah Buenos Aires” needs to be a band name, song title, something. Or maybe just the new secondary name of the blog… “AVC.com — fuck yeah Buenos Aires.”
#Yesssss
I thought about that tag line idea too Rob
It’s obvious that the age group of people that you hang around with is heavily skewed in the 20’s, eh?
Fred, I am from Buenos Aires ( living in NYC ) and I am *really* surprised about these stats. Could you dig deeper? Is there anything driving this?. I think it is such a singular thing that there may be some really interesting insights waiting to be discovered if you look at the data. Why is Buenos Aires such an outlier?
I’m guessing the number of Buenos Aires visitors is directly correlated with your posts on bitcoin, given its pervasiveness in that particular corner of the world.
Love that the category is “weblogs”.
Old school!!
I laud your desire to increase the female readership, but that is a long, long term project.A data dump like this on the Gotham Gal’s site would be an interesting contrast.
ah, 3% more Female ratio than from the twitter numbers 🙂
More engagement here than on Twitter.
Im sure that is well within the margin of error for those demographic stats.
What’s that dot in West Africa, comparable in size to that of Buenos Aires?
There’s not a lot there – maybe some pirates in the Gulf of Guinea have taken an interest in VC?
syndicate that invests “reallocated” loot?
I actually now think that dot represents the population of “(not set)”, based on size and color comparison to BA and then the table list of popular cities.I wish it were pirates, oil bootleggers, or some other nefarious group.
“If it is true, I am very proud of that fact.”great.
Chiming in on both today and yesterday’s post – statistics paint a picture of access but also of interest. I’m sure there are ways you could make this blog more accessible via exposure, although I’m not sure what they are. You’ve done a pretty stellar job so far. One observation – Rush Limbaugh has 1.8 mm Facebook fans, Ellen has 18.0 mm, the SBA has 120k. Only so many people are truly interested in entrepreneurship. Even less take it to the mat and do something about it.
Ok someone needs to move to Greenland so a dot appears on the map for that spot!!!
I’ll think about it.
Perfect! I’ve blocked Chinese comments on my AVC feed…..so that works great!
ha!
we need to better work here to improve readership here Dallas.
Is there data behind the comment “These people read the daily post in their email and often reply to me via email and generally don’t participate in the comments” – writing as someone who subscribes via email, almost always reads the post in my email client I do occasionally comment and more frequently read the comments. I will click through (or not) to the comments based on the specific topic and I can imagine others doing the same.
One of the community has a big day today. If you pray, take a moment and say a prayer for the Andy Swan family. If you aren’t religious, take a moment and keep them in your thoughts. Andy’s wife has cancer and has an operation today. Sending good karma your way @andyswan:disqus. https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Thanks for sharing.Much ++++++++vity to @andyswan:disqus family!
Appreciated. It went well…as well as having 2/3 of a lung removed can go I think. 7 days in hospital to come so I’m sure I will be poking and prodding on here often lol.Love AVC peeps.
Didn’t catch this til now. Big hugs to you & your fam Andy, been there done that.
emailed you. Things will come out ok
Back at you Swan!
“These people read the daily post in their email and often reply to me via email and generally don’t participate in the comments.”Is this an acceptable thing to do? Email your comments in. Seems like it just creates a lot of ‘work’ for the blog author to even read, let alone respond.
I’ve added these two websites to my list because I want to learn more about best practices in inclusion in tech:* http://blackfounders.com* https://www.blacksintechnol…And I found a list of 9 amazing black female founders:* http://www.inc.com/kathryn-…
You are crushing it in the list category. 🙂
Well done. If you can see it, you can be it 🙂
And check this out. Women/design businesses/pointedly not focusing on the young and white … http://www.designsponge.com…
This is so rad. I’m just catching up to a list of women founders you provided a while back, great reading list combined.
Well, Jack Ma of Alibaba must know a thing or two…”I feel proud that more than 34 percent of senior management are women. They really make this company’s yin and yang balanced,” Ma said. “Women balance the logic and the instinct. I would say this is the ‘secret sauce’ of the company.”The thing is that Yin+Yang is so innately part of our cultural DNA that it informs our startup cultures and the way we think and do things.
I love that you still use Feedblitz (and even Feedburner!). Feedly (where I read every day) reports that you have 60k subscribers.
hmm. that’s interesting and quite different than feedburner.
Your China comment made me laughSignedA daily email reader
I can read you in Hong Kong, and I have actually read you in Shanghai, but I had a VPN, so that doesn’t really count. I opened up this blog post and was going to comment but then got distracted. I wanted to know if, over time (and even though your readership may have logically increased over time because your writing has become popular) you have noticed any spikes in the number of visitors or frequency of visitors during certain years. I wonder what contextual historical events in the VC ecosystem might be correlated to those spikes. I know that in certain periods of “history” i have gone to your site more frequently. Like when there was a lot of noise about Twitter during the IPO, etc.
Yup, the last time you did this was in December 2013. http://avc.com/2013/12/traf…It’s interesting to note that the Top 10 countries have remained almost unchanged, except that Argentina has kicked out Ireland.
Interesting stats. As I look at them, I’m a minority in several areas. I’m in the “19%” female. I put quotation marks around those numbers because whenever I look up what a company has for information on me, the ones who allow it, if there’s a browser involved I’m invariably a 18-34 year old male (despite having two Y chromosomes and pushing 60). I figure that’s because of all the technology reading I do. Also, I’m one of those RSS users. Thanks for keeping that channel open. Love it! And, always love reading your blog daily. Thanks.
Brings to mind this FiveThirtyEight post about how messy these metrics are. What’s for real and what’s inferred?http://fivethirtyeight.com/…
Do you get weird ad targeting because of it (I do)
“The 19% female audience [is] something I don’t feel great about and hope to change over time.”As mentioned yesterday, while it’s an area for improvement, it’s almost certainly way better than most VC blogs. So think of it as traction as much as an area for improvement 🙂 And don’t be shy about enlisting those of us who identify as “she” when and where we can help!
Those two little dots on the North Island of New Zealand.. that’s me and a colleague of mine #VCdownunder #comehereforaholiday
Great stats!So, what?
FRED:could you consider making the analytics of user profile a yearly anniversary entry?Many of the blog posts that have been considered valuable via participation andvaluable contributing entries can be the guide. You can use the yearly anniversary in Google calender and it will assist you in maintaining the interest on populartopics unless a current event supersedes it. (Breaking news event, social event, etc)Just a suggestion from a commoner.
Would love to see a comparison from before and after Disqus platform started directing people to replying/commenting on disqus.com
not blocked in china. sorry to disappoint.https://en.greatfire.org/av…
I’d be interested in hearing more about your female followers. Also, how confident are you with the gender data?
We do have access in China, although slow. — an ex-employee of usv portfolio