LFGSS in numbers

More numbers, because I was curious.

Totals:

• 5 million comments
  
• 152 thousand conversations
  
• 400 events
  
• 49 thousand registered members
  
• 24 thousand active members (logged in within the last 30 days)
  
• 2.3 million pages indexed by Google
  
  

Each month (avg):

• 6.8 million pages viewed (if comparing to old vBulletin numbers, this site has fewer interstitials on redirects and page views is approximately triple the old numbers in the first post of this conversation)
  
• 1 million visits (sessions) from about about 175 thousand users (better measurement than it used to be, unique cookies over visits, rather than calculated approximation)
  
• £550 costs (similar to first post costs, but 3 x traffic and users served)
  
  

Each day:

• 33 thousand unique visitors
  
• More than 1,000 concurrent people online
  
• 3,000 new comments
  
• 80 new conversations
  
• 35 new members
  
• £20 in donations
  
• 120 thousand pages indexed by Google
  
• 30 thousand search results shown on Google
  
• 6 thousand click-throughs from Google
  
  

Some of these numbers come from Google Analytics, which doesn't have complete info (ad-blockers, natch), but additionally:

• 75% of traffic comes from desktop browsers
  
• 22% from mobile phones
  
• 3% from other stuff (tablets, games consoles, TVs, whatever)
  
  

On the money stuff, affiliates has almost dried up, donations support us exclusively.

There is an impending issue on the money... our costs will rise in the next year.

We use lots of free things or cheap things and these have thresholds for how much you can use. We use a lot, we're about to cross over thresholds on things like Google Maps (so I may change the default map provider, but even then I'd have to pay a few hundred £ per month to get the next cheapest based on Open Street Maps). Same is true of even Google Analytics which I use to get info on devices that use the site, performance of the site for people overseas, etc... I can't afford the paid version so on this we'll start doing client side sampling to reduce the data we send.

All in all... very busy site, the numbers remain huge and still growing, it costs us as much today as it did 6 years ago but we serve 3 x the number of traffic.

It's all good, but eyes to the future as I need to fix monetisation to ensure that it doesn't crunch when costs rise.