Here’s the usual monthly post on traffic volumes and other miscellaneous site updates. For the first time this month I’ve started including the statistics provided by Webalizer as well as those provided by Awstats. Webalizer, as I said a month or so ago, gives readership at least 20% higher than Awstats, and therefore those will be the ones I put in the prospectus when LKL launches its IPO.
But towards the end of May I also installed a little WordPress statistics plugin. It’s a dream. While the other statistics services tell me that some Naver forum or other is linking to me, the WordPress plugin gives me the exact URI. It’s got much more user-friendly data as to what posts people are reading, and as if to prove this it also provides data as to what outward-pointing links people are clicking on within my site. The WordPress statistics are day-by-day rather than month-to-date, so that if you check them every day you can get a much better idea of what’s going on: one day’s traffic can get lost in a wodge of month-to-date data. So for example, I noticed a couple of days ago that Lee Bul’s Hydra was getting a lot of attention — just for the day. If I was looking at month-to-date statistics that little nugget would have been lost off the bottom of the list of popular posts topped by Rain, Jeon Ji-hyun, Pucca and Pororo.
The downside of the WordPress statistics is that they don’t present very flattering volume numbers. While Awstats and Webalizer tell me my daily readership is north of 2,500, WordPress is the bucket of cold water which says I’m reaching just over 1,000. Still, 1,000 was my target for the year, so I’m satisfied.
Seeing what articles people are reading, and what search terms they are using to find my site, gives valuable information. For instance, a couple of days ago someone was googling “David Heather North Korean Art”. I replicated that search only to find that I was several pages off the google front page. The reason? I was being politically correct in my posts on the subject and had been referring to the DPRK instead of “North Korea”. So in yesterday’s post I rectified that, so that in the future LKL hopefully will appear on the front page of any such google search.
Another example, and it’s obvious really. When people visit my site for the first time the things they click on are the links across the top of the page. That’s what I would do as well. But of course most of the stuff in those links is really old, introductory stuff, and also much of what’s in there I’m now mildly embarrassed about. One day I’ll re-jig the site and put some of that more naïve material somewhere in the sidebar, leaving the header to contain the links which I’m happy for people to click on.
On the subject of the sidebar, regular visitors will have noticed a few minor changes: a couple of new links to external sites — Koreanwiz for its coverage of TV Drama and Party Pooper for its healthily cynical coverage of some of the Korean Wave hype. For a while too I was experimenting with a google search tool in the sidebar, but I couldn’t get it to work properly if I wanted the results to appear on a page of my own design. Another task for the growing to-do list.
I’ve also installed a little gizmo which lists the posts I’ve updated most recently. A lot of the time I spend on my site is spent tidying up old posts: adding to them, updating them with new internal and external links, and so on. So in case you’re interested, half way down the sidebar is a list of the ten most recently updated posts. It looks pretty ugly in anything other than Internet Explorer as I haven’t fixed the css yet, but it’s good enough for the moment. In due course I’ll move it from there and put it at the bottom of the front page, replacing the list of sites I’ve recently linked to, which doesn’t strike me as being terribly interesting.
Other perspectives I’ve got from the statistics this month?
- Celebrity Blogwatch is undoubtedly my most popular page, and consequently PopSeoul is the most popular site which people visit from LKL
- I must be annoying a lot of my readers: Super Junior is one of the most popular searches which land people here, and I’m not a big fan of SuJu T’s first single.
- Pucca is more popular than I originally thought: according to the WordPress statistics she’s one of my big draws.
- An inexplicably large number of people are interested in the Boryeong Mud Festival. Somewhat more explicably, Cheju’s Love Land and North Korean military marching continue to attract visitors.
- I could earn a fortune if I were an expert in the Yuko system, judging by the general interest in magic straight perms.
- I seem to be getting a lot of hits from stumbleupon.com, so I need to work out what that site is all about.
Top 10 “genuine” linkers during May.
- http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php (98)
- http://koreapopwars.blogspot.com (74)
- http://worldtown.naver.com/nboard/read.php (31)
- http://www.rjkoehler.com (28)
- http://gdimension.typepad.com/gdimension/2005/08/oh_my_god.html (20)
- http://www.koreanfilm.org/dc/dcboard.php (16)
- http://kimchi-for-breakfast.blogspot.com (15)
- http://forums.eslcafe.com/korea/viewtopic.php (14)
- http://helikoppter.blogspot.com (11)
- http://korea.banoffeepie.com (7)
- http://showdjgonbbc.blogspot.com (7)
Top 10 hotlinkers (with number of bandwidth thefts during May).
- http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm (7369)
- http://jewelinpalace.blogfa.com (3344)
- http://www.iran-eng.com/showthread.php (2158)
- http://forum.paseoclub.co.uk/index.php (1268)
- http://ubertiful.net/stars/kr/ (1121)
- http://themoviesnatchers.blogspot.com/search/label/Terror (628)
- http://technokitten.blogspot.com (537)
- http://www.downelink.com/member/profile.aspx (483)
- http://www.last.fm/user/Enji_Hoshi/ (400)
- http://www.12ozprophet.com/forum/showthread.php (340)
It’s irritating that I can’t track down the MySpace user who’s accounting for 16% of my externally-linked traffic. A couple of months ago there was a fellow who was linking to my image of Fly to the Sky and using it as the background to his MySpace home page. Maybe it’s the same guy. Maybe I’ll do my Lee-Sabi-redirect trick on him, until I finally work out how to block hotlinks without blowing my site up. Meanwhile, for the moment I don’t want to block hotlinks universally: I can see from the above that I am inadvertently helping to promote Dae Jang Geum in the middle east via my second hotlinker.
And finally, the graphs, which for the first time include Webalizer as well as Awstats. And in the Visits graph I’m also tracking the WordPress numbers.
