Comment of the Day - November 28, 2005 - What brings you to LXer

Chris: Lxer is bigger than many people realize. It might surprise people to know just how big we have become.

We may have the broadest coverage of news of any Linux News site. Approximately 50% of our readers come from outside the US. Approximately one-third of our readers use our RSS feeds which means we don't usually see them on the site. Also, people run our RSS feeds on their web sites for news. To see an example, visit http://linuxhomepage.com .

Those links take the user directly to the article rather than to our web site and then to the article. That keeps the traffic down.

Of the 15,000 average visitors we see daily, only 500 are registered. So, we have a smaller community of commenters than normal for our size.

The real key to success at Lxer lies with content. We're content providers and thousands of web sites around the web post our articles and stories. That also means we have a lot of visitors and page views. This month, we will have about 1.5 million page views. You won't see that kind of volume from 500 registered users at other community sites.

I think the formula works. But I'm a noobie. What do you think?

A few replies. First, I *am* surprised by the number of visitors, and so I fall into the group who didn't realize how big it is. Fortunately, however, it still has the close-knit feeling of a small group, for reasons that you mentioned. For the quality and number of news articles, I'm not surprised there are a lot of readers, but the ratio of posters/readers is comfortably small.

For the statistics you quoted, those are really interesting. I wonder if they could be published as a normal part of the site, updated as the day goes on?

Finally, as for the RSS feeds, that would explain why a lot of people aren't posting--they're not really here. Ingenious. :)

Chris

Chris: Your can see the stats at http://lxer.com/411/

But we won't update them during the day yet even though it's on the wishlist.

Cheers!

Pretty cool man.

I'll add that the last three months have seen our readership grow substantially. I'm the self-proclaimed stat-watcher, posting our growth rate to the rest of our editorial team. Since Tom showed you our stats page, you can check my math. Suffice it to say we're growing by leaps and bounds at the moment. I would say our growth over the last three months is nearing 26%. It'll likely be slightly higher by Thursday AM.

The layout is appealing to the eye. On so many sites, you just get plain lost trying to find articles or who wrote what. One of the greatest strengths the Linux/BSD community has is the fact that we like to hash things out and find better ways to enjoy using our computers. I learn more from readers comments sometimes than I do from the articles or from trying to RTFM =) LOL