CS183 Notes - Traffic So Far
I’ve put 10 class notes essays online so far. That material represents roughly half of the course (there are 19 classes in total).
Several people have asked me what the traffic to the site has been. I always enjoy when people post this kind of data that gives their projects more transparency (e.g. this). So here is some of that for anyone who might be interested.
The date range is April 2nd (when the class started) through this morning, May 10th.
At first glance an average visit duration of 2 minutes seems very low. Many people are not reading material that, at least for a moment, is literally right in front of them. But maybe 2 minutes is actually quite high. While many people may tl;dr click away, many others seem to be reading the full posts.
The image below shows the spike from David Brooks’ Creative Monopoly piece in the NYT. Daily visitors shot up to 25k and have since settled down to about 5k/day since.
(I edited this graphic a bit to get the visits axis labeled on this scale.)
Update: here is the visit duration view:
Some possibly relevant things that people have told me today:
- Readers using things like Instapaper or Pocket might not be fully represented.
- Google Analytics can’t detect single page time, so visits from people who read in full off a link and then bounce go unrecorded or are logged in the first bucket.
The traffic stuff is interesting. I won’t pretend I know exactly what the stats mean. In some sense it doesn’t matter; it’s the same undertaking whether 2, 200, or 200k people follow along. But truly interesting ideas should spread far and wide, and it’s been fun to see that happening.
