Our ace network administrator, Matt McClure, has just compiled YoChicago traffic stats for the month of May and for the twelve months ending May 31.
We rely on Google Analytics to monitor our traffic on a day-to-day basis but look to the server logs for authoritative numbers.
We reached 41,752 unique visitors during the month of May, and 328,652 unique visitors during the twelve months ending May 31.
On a year-over-year basis, according to Google Analytics, our unique visitor count increased by 76.3%, and showed a seasonal dip of 14% over the month of April.
Our increased traffic, we speculate, is largely due to an expansion of our editorial content into rentals, a much broader market in Chicago at the current time than real estate for sale. Our apartment Lists and Maps, and our Guides have quickly proved to be popular features.
Those seem like very impressive numbers.
For local real-estate related opinion/info, I have been frequenting basically two websites, this website and cribchatter.com, and have been for about the past 12-15 months or so.
I find the information and opinions discussed on both to be pretty valuable; I appreciate the broader range of topics posted on this website, and I also like the format that cribchatter uses, which is basically post two or three real-estate offerings per day, and people give their opinions on them.
On Cribchatter, although there are a lot of flippant or mostly useless comments and bickering, I also find some very interesting opinions and information in there as well.
Any idea why the blog posts here don’t seem to elicit many comments, whereas cribchatter posts seem to consistently get at least 20-50, and fairly often in the hundreds?
A lot of the blog posts here are pretty interesting, and I would be interested in ready a lively discussion/debate from a broader group on a lot of them…
nwzimmer
Early on in Yo’s history we had many comments – the vast majority of them useless or worse. I set out to stifle commenters who weren’t contributing facts or intelligent fact-based opinion, and that quickly reduced the number of comments. I also banned some of the more prolific commenters for anti-Semitic or racist remarks or simply because they were know-nothings who insisted on dominating discussions without contributing to them. Some of those people became CribChatter regulars and are still there years later.
Our goal is to inform people who are looking for a new home or apartment, not host people who just want to waste their time and readers’ time.
Most popular real estate Web sites attract very few comments, and I think the main reason is that most people who are looking for new places to live don’t value comments much and therefore don’t contribute to them.
More than 80% of our audience in any given month reaches us by search or via a referral link on a topic they’re interested in. A very high percentage of those people are first-time visitors. They read an item, or several, and move on. They don’t want to read about real estate in general or discuss it.
On average, we get 2 minutes and 19 seconds of our readers’ attention per visit, and we’re happy with that.