Posts from Traffic

I took at look at Google Analytics this morning and was a bit surprised to see the makeup of the top ten sources of traffic to AVC in the past month.

If we compare this to May 2010, when AVC got almost exactly the same amount of visitors, you can see that the makeup of traffic has changed a fair bit.

Search, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Facebook, and Disqus have all risen a fair bit as sources. Direct, Feedburner, Hacker News, and various specific sites have waned as sources of traffic.

Mobile visits have also doubled in the past two years from 11% to 22%. Frankly I thought they would be even higher by now.

What this tells me is platforms are ascendent as drivers of audience, particularly platforms like Twitter that are optimized for mobile.

It is also nice to see Disqus cracking the top ten. And the characteristics of the Disqus traffic is very different from the traffic that comes from the other top ten sources. The Disqus audience stays longer and is way more engaged. That makes sense. I hope to see Disqus rise in the top ten as they do more to drive traffic around their network.

It makes me think that Disqus could use a mobile reading app that shows Disqus users the interesting conversations happening in their network in real time. I would certainly be a big user of that.

But no matter how you slice it, we are in the era of mobile platforms. That is pretty clear to me this morning.

I was at a meeting yesterday regarding the ongoing online piracy discussion and the conversation turned to search as a source of traffic to sites with pirated content. I stopped the conversation and noted that search isn't what it used to be and pointed out that many websites get more traffic from social than search.

Here at AVC, it is no contest. Here's the top ten traffic sources to AVC in the past thirty days:

Google/organic is search. Direct and feedburner are regular visitors. Everything else (Stumbleupon, Twitter (t.co), Hacker News (news.ycombinator), Techmeme, google/referral, Facebook, and Linkedin are social. So if we break the top ten into three categories, direct is about half of the top ten's traffic, social is 40%, and search is 10%.

This blog isn't normal in a few ways. The fact that Twitter generates 13x Facebook in traffic is one example of that. And the very high level of direct/regular readers is probably a bit unusual too.

I'm curious if anyone is aware of a broader study of traffic sources on the Internet and how search and social compare these days. I suspect that they are neck and neck across the entire Internet or possibly that social has surpassed search. But I have not seen that data and I'd love to.