Following in Brent’s GeekTonic footsteps, I’d like to point out a few fun facts from 2009 ZNF blogging as we enter our 6th year rocking the suburbs.
Despite my earlier assumption, given our evolving strategy of fewer but more meaningful posts, blog traffic was actually up about 30%. We averaged 66 posts a month in 2007, 48/mo in 2008, and hit an all-time low of 42 in 2009. I’ve yet to crunch the numbers, but suspect revenue growth was flat year over year as the global economic situation negatively and significantly impacted advertising during the first half of ’09. ZNF is a largely labor of love, so we’re not really sweating it.
In terms of visitors, as you can see from the Google Analytics query up top, nearly 70% ran Windows (at least some of the time) in 2009 and were pretty evenly split between Internet Explorer and Firefox. And there’s still too many on IE 6 – 18% of total ZNF traffic to be exact. I imagine a portion of those also account for the 1.32% who visited via dialup. Dialup?! Which brings us to source referrals. Like most websites, a vast amount of our traffic comes in via search engines. Well just one in particular:
Beyond Google’s various referrals, we saw a significant number of visitors arrive via Engadget, Gizmodo, and CNET. (Thank you, Big Dogs!) Plus, we had an astonishing amount of direct traffic. (Thank you, ZNF Loyalists!) In terms of social media news aggregation, Twitter showed real growth as a 2009 traffic source. Techmeme also sent a number of visitors our way. It’s not the sort of supersize traffic you’d see from Digg or Slashdot, but I like to think it’s a smarter sort of readership.
Beyond the ZNF regulars, our most popular posts were product-related – most likely informing purchasing decisions and used in troubleshooting. #1, by a long shot, was a brief write-up of the Samsung BD-P1600 Blu-ray player. Sadly, I can’t say there’s anything extraordinary or insightful about it. I just managed to be the first to catch this box in the wild. Fortunately, a few posts truly in our wheelhouse also made it to the top, such as my rumination on the future of Windows Media Center extenders and coverage of a TiVo quarterly call referencing their upcoming DirecTV hardware.
