We have passed 5 million “page views”, but it is difficult to interpret web statistics
We have recently passed the five million “page loads” mark, which roughly can be interpreted as the number of articles read on BKWine. We say thank you to all the readers!
Sweden’s first wine site! (?)
Five million article read, that is the number we recently passed on BKWine Magazine (bkwine.com). Amazing! We have written about wine on the Internet since 1996. In fact, as far as we know, we were the first Swedish wine site! That we have now passed five million articles read is fantastic.
To be precise, we have passed 5,024,483 “page loads” on bkwine.com according to one of our statistics tool, StatCounter.
We did not collect any statistics in the beginning so in fact the real number is more than what today’s statistics show. It was only in January 2005 that we began with statistics so we have probably (definitely!) missed some. 2005 was about the time when we started our first blog. Little did we know where it would lead. Most likely we have missed a few hundred thousand in the stats.
Traffic increased rapidly during the first “statistical years.” At that time there were (still) not many who wrote about wine on the Internet. In the late 00’s it became more common to write on wine on the internet and thus there was greater competition for readers, which also showed in the statistics.
In the beginning we did not count statistics on our blogs (we first had one, then two, then three) because they were hosted separately on Google’s blogging tool called Blogger (aka Blogspot).
Therefore, these statistics probably in reality a fairly significant underestimation of the total history. But it still gives a pretty good picture.
How does it look today?
Originally we had everything we did on the internet on a single site (bkwine.com). Then we started a few separate blogs (on Blogger). But it got a little messy. And difficult to grasp, difficult to find the information.
today, we have divided it into four different sites, each with its own focus and its own blog:
- BKWine Magazine, bkwine.com, that is bilingual
- BKWine Vinresor (Wine Tours in Swedish)
- BKWine Tours
- BKWine Photography
It makes it easier, we hope, to find the information that you, the reader, is interested in.
Page views and visitors
The two main measures for an online sites are “page views” and “unique visitors“. Unique visitors is undoubtedly the most important and describes, simply, how many people have visited and looked at your site. Page views describes how many web sites pages a visitor has looked at.
We have reached 5 million pages viewed. We are approaching 2.5 million unique visitors, accumulated over time.
Today we have around 25,000 “unique visitors” per month, ie 25 000 readers. This is actually down a bit from what we had some while back.
When we completely renovated our site and built a brand new one – actually, four new sites – we lost a lot of traffic. Before the renovation we were at 35,000 unique visitors per month. But when you re-build a site you inevitably lose much traffic because all the old pages (URL:s) disappear. One starts over almost from the beginning. Now we are steadily going up, month after month, and we are currently at around 25,000 unique visitors per month.
Sweden’s most read independent wine site?
It is impossible to know which site is the “biggest”, that has the most readers. At least as long as not all sites use the same statistical tools and publishes statistics publicly. But we can probably guess that BKWine Magazine is doing pretty well on the ranking list of Sweden’s most read wine sites.
We are probably doing OK even on an international comparison but “competition” is certainly stronger in English.
We are probably behind some of the sites operated by importers and wine sites published by printed newspapers. But among the autonomous, independent wine sites on the internet I think that we are pretty well placed on the ranking.
I hope it’s because you think that you find much of interest on BKWine Magazine!
Thank you to all readers! And continue to visit us!
Read more about the difficulty of interpreting Internet statistics and about what you should think about when reading web stats in the next article: 5 million articles read, yes, but how should you interpret statistics on the internet?
