So, did the Subsurface 3.0 announcement start a download frenzy?

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Sun Feb 24 07:23:40 PST 2013


Jan Schubert <Jan.Schubert at GMX.li> writes:

> On 24.02.2013 01:32, Lutz Vieweg wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I was just wondering whether the different efforts to make
>> the public aware of Subsurface 3.0 succeeded in sparking a
>> download frenzy - Dirk, you probably noticed some spike in
>> web-access / download counters?
>
> Interesting discussion, I'd like to open a talk about the website and
> SEO and user attracting stuff in general.
>
> Dirk, would it be possible and transparent for an OSS project to set up
> public web access/analyzer statistics!? A simple awstats or something
> like this should do. If you like or if you have already it might be an
> option not to feed it to public in general but to people in here
> interested in (count me and most likely Lutz in please).

Oh I collect all kinds of stats and of course all the log files, but I
definitely will not make all those details public, but I have no problem
sharing them with specific people, though.
The overall statistics I see no harm in posting here - see below.

> I'd be interessted to see how public announcement affects accesses to
> the website. You mentioned country statistics several time in here. Also
> Operating Systems would be interested in my humble opinion.

The Google Plus announcement by Linus is always the biggest driver of
traffic - and it also greatly distorts the OS statistics. It pushes up
Android dramatically, and Linux in general (as his followers have a
self-selection bias towards being Linux users).

Right now we have (rounded to two digits)
17%  USA
15%  Germany
7.1% France
6.7% Finland
5.0% Sweden
4.0% UK
and then a looong tail with more than 50 countries.

On the OS front
35%  Window
19%  Linux
18%  Android
16%  Mac
9.3% Ubuntu 
1.4% iPhone :-)
(I'm amused that the statistics also break out Ubuntu as not Linux)

> Personally I'd also like to see some Referrer statistics knowing where
> the people are coming from. Arno f.i. told me he found us by a link on
> the Heinrichs Weikamp website which is something I did not have in mind.

Refering domains

47%  plus.google.com :-)
8.1% google.com
6.1% facebook.com & m.facebook.com
4.3% dykama.nu (the Scandinavians are strong here...)
2.2% snorkkeli.net ("")
2.0% scubaboard.com

and a long tail. Interesting: heinrichsweikamp.com shows up with 1.7% - was
much higher before the announcements downed out our regular traffic...
Heinrichs Weikamp even mentioned us in their flyer for the OSTC 3!

> And as you (Dirk) seem to enhance the webiste itself at the moment
> (multi language, right frame on all pages, ...) it would also be nice to
> include some common social network stuff for Google+ and Facebook. I'm
> really impressed how active, widespread and viral the G+ communication
> is while (the still new) Facebook page is still sort of waking up. I'd
> not have expected it this extreme. Seeing the "ripples" [1] in G+ is
> really impressive and we should really thank Linus being such a strong
> supporter on G+ :-).

Yes - he and his two gazillion followers make a huge difference.

I'm very uncomfortable adding any of the G+ of FB code to my website as
I have serious privacy concerns with them. Right now all that is done is
counting inside of FB and one js snippet to link in Google Analytics.

/D


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