Surfski.info cracks 1,000,000 pageviews!

Just how many people visit www.surfski.info?  I have to confess that I go to pageview counter several times a day to see how we're doing...

And the last couple of months have been enormously exciting - we seem to be attracting more people from more places than ever before.  Here are some statistics that we'd like to share with you...

Measuring Traffic

We have four ways of measuring traffic - the on-site counter, the ad server, Google Analytics and the amount of bandwidth used by the site.  And they all agree that our readership is growing week by week. 

This is good news for us - because it means that we must be providing something worthwhile, otherwise you guys, our readers, wouldn't be coming back for more. {sidebar id = 3}

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a simple measure of traffic - the more bandwidth we use, the more stuff is happening on the site.  In February this year we used 11 gigabytes of bandwidth; in March, 16; in April, 20; in May (when Molokai happened), we used 24 gigabytes.  Last month we used 25 gigabytes and this month so far we already used 13.5 and we're only 10 days into the month.

We keep having to ask our Internet Service Provider for more bandwidth!  But it's a great problem to have.

Google Analytics 

Here are some more stats from the last month, courtesy of Google Analytics.

In the last month we had around 8,500 unique individuals who together visited the site 30,000 times and read 139,000 pages!  Oh, and on 1 July - the same day as the ARB Surf Ski World Cup - we cracked one million pageviews since the site was launched in November 2005.

In the graph you can see where the visitor numbers peaked - on 1 July, the day of the 2007 ARB Surf Ski World Cup, when we carried live commentary on the race.  But the really pleasing thing about the graph is the clear upward trend in the numbers.

What's our worst day of the week?  Saturday.  When everyone's out paddling...  On Sunday the numbers start climbing again and it seems that on Monday the first thing everyone does when they get to the office is... go to surfski.info.  Monday is consistently our best day of the week.

Where do our visitors come from?

When we started Surfski.info, not surprisingly the city with the highest percentage of our readers was Cape Town, South Africa.  Today it's Sydney, Australia.  We have visitors from Norway to Tahiti; from Japan to Iraq (amazingly, we keep getting a few visitors from Iraq!)

We recently had our article on remounting skis translated into Japanese for a paddling site in Japan. 

Here's a graph that shows where in the world our visitors come from:

 

Global Audience

We truly have a global audience!  The fastest growing segment is Europe where we're discovering new pockets of surf ski paddlers (in Sweden and Norway) and races (Belgium, Germany) all the time.

Advertising

The bigger the site has become, the more work it is and in order to make it sustainable Alain and I are trying to earn a few dollars - and we've begun to offer advertising on the site.  In fact we just had our first customer (in New Zealand) renew their contract - clearly they've found the advertising to be worthwhile.  We installed a fairly sophisticated ad server that allows our advertisers to specify:

• Where in the world the ads are seen e.g. only Australia and New Zealand
• How many times per month the ads are flighted e.g. 10,000 times a month maximum
• And how many times an individual will see the ad e.g. never show the ad more than 30 times to the same person.

If you're interested in advertising on the site, send us an email on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we'll send you our rates card.

A huge thank you to all our readers!

Without you, we wouldn't be here.  We love the sport and we love writing about it!  But without the feedback we get daily from you through the comments on the articles, the debates on the forums and the emails we get directly from you - we just wouldn't do it.

So - a huge thank you to all of you for your support and encouragement!

The Future

We have such plans for the site - we're going to be bringing you better and better coverage of events, more video clips, more ski reviews, more Getting Started articles.  We're going to be regionalizing the site so that each area can have topical, local news as well as the stories that are of global interest.  We're going to be bringing you up close and personal with the best paddlers in the world.  We're going to be bringing you DVDs with movies showcasing all the big races.

The sport of surf ski is going to the next level - and we want to help it get there... stay tuned, it's been a lot of fun so far, but you ain't seen nothin' yet!