As a long-time fan of the site, I think it would be interesting to see a breakdown of article page hits. I realize it may or may not be important to take into account, but I was wondering how many people, in practice, go to page one of an article and then skip to the final thoughts and conclusions. I try not to do this, but sometimes I do so out of a desire to see the outcome, then I go back and re-read the article. I think it's akin to reading the last pages of a book before reading it all the way through. I don't do that most of the time, but I find the idea more than a little tempting. In the case of these articles, sometimes I don't go back and read it all, but I try to most of the time. So, what do you say? Even a forum post to give an idea of numbers would be great. And I'm sorry if this is too silly to consider, curiosity just got the better of me.
We do this all the time to know what pages are most important and interesting, then aim to do more of them. It's particularly useful in graphics reviews where each page is a game - so we can change game pages not being read As for making them public, I cant see that happening sorry.
Well, I appreciate the reply and I understand the reluctance to release it as public information. It wasn't until after I posted the idea that I realized it might be extremely silly to ask. I would imagine the highest ranked pages are the first, last, and charts for game performance in-between. Oh, well. Maybe next time I can think of something worth asking.
You're pretty much correct. Generally the first page will do the most traffic, then there's a sharp decline until the very last page (or whichever has the verdict on it) which generally does about the same as the first page.
Generally games reviews do the most traffic too. In fact, they do all the traffic. Nobody reads any of the news or hardware content and everyone simply re-reads ALL the games content ALL the time - and when I say everyone I mean as in there's not a person on this planet who hasn't read my words and VALIDATED MY LIFE IN SOMEWAY! But, yeah; first page and last page do most traffic and certain days and types of content do better than others pretty much as you'd expect, though we obviously won't release any figures publicly.
Actually I ignore the game reviews tbh. All I do is look at the last page. Now hardware reviews, thats good material right there.
I would guess that the member-authored articles get the most traffic. This includes project logs and front page case mod articles. What is the percentage of staff and member-authored traffic compared to total traffic?