Continuing the discussion from Survey: CHOWHOUND or not CHOWHOUND?:
The traffic shot up from Aug to Sep? So Chowhound remodel/redesign is a success? (I cannot remember exactly when it was launched)
Well there’s also that crazy dip in August, down to 5k or less views, which is hard to explain as well.
But these are page visits overall, not unique viewers, so we could be seeing the numbers for everyone complaining in Site Talk or whatever it is now.
Interestingly, chowhound.com numbers are 1% of what chow.com numbers have been. It’s hard to build a narrative out of any of this.
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I do not believe for a second it’s a mark of success, except as a stat to sell to spamm…er, advertisers. I think it’s a lot of us checking in constantly, and also linked to search referrals and need to scroll and click all over. I think it’s mostly controversy and rubber necking but time will tell if it’s a lot of one shot, click, look and leave searchers.
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Yes, I also looked at that earlier. I really don’t know how to interpret that data.
We have all done it with are ex relationships , Drive by his or hers house stalking your ex . Oh there’s that dickweeds car . You speed away . Stop lurking , It’s over,
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For various reasons, I have been searching for old posts this past month and every search takes 5-10 tries. Definitely accidentally clicked on a few ads.
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It strikes me as though the redesign is doing exactly what it was intended to do - bring in more web traffic from Google searches. There was a philosophical shift to visitors from content providers. I was particularly struck by the near literal shift from the old Manifesto’s “blazing trails” to the new design’s suggestions to “follow” tags that are “trending”.
To try and put it another way, lingering over a long, tasting menu is no longer encouraged. They wanna turn tables.
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Ahem.
Who’s "we*?
Just saynzall.
This site shows a real dropoff in posting- kind of falling off a cliff: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.chow.com
im one of those who have been rubbernecking on site talk. But then it hit me late last week that I was driving traffic so haven’t logged in since. With HO gaining some momentum in SF, I’m hoping this can become my home site again.
So, yeah, I’m done with CH. Sad to give it up, but life goes on.
As a former market research professional, before I’d take those stats as reflective of actual “traffic” on the CH website, I’d want to look at how the data was collected, and how it might be skewed. The fine print says, “Chowhound.com has received an estimated 51,200 visits over the last 30 days. The number of visits differs from visitors (or unique visitors). Visits includes multiple visits from the same individual (repeat visits).” Clearly, TPTB had the ability to artificially inflate these stats.
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“Visits” don’t mean actual posts, do they?
No, just any arrival from a search or a link from another site referral, any time you show up and scroll or click on anything you’re recorded as a site visit stat. AFAIK.
But a VISIT doesn’t account for actual participation. Without participation, the Google search parameters will push them much further down the search page if the content isn’t there to tie to the actual search.
Then again, if all they want is ad views, the visits are perfectly fine. Until they’re not, because there’s no more real content.
VIP has said that making you scroll a lot more is intentional; it takes one past ads involuntarily, even with ad blocker. Referral rates from other sites and search engines are the metric they’re after not user generated content.
Perhaps they’re not after user-generated content, but if people STOP going to the site because there’s no “there there”, their metrics are going to skew downward, because referral rates and Google searches are going to push down their importance.
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And eventually the drop in new posts will decrease the relevancy of much of the information.
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