In today's article we'll examine the numbers. Which threads have had the most replies? Which is the most active forum? How many people come to the site each month? Let's dive in, look at the numbers, and see what interesting things we can find.
Let's first look at the traffic to the site. During 2014, we had 963,000 people visit, compared to 750,000 in 2013. 13.1 million pages were viewed, compared to 10.2 million in 2013. On average, visitors to ATP spend over 6 minutes per visit and 55% of the visitors return multiple times. In case you're curious, 26% of our users use the Chrome browser, 22% use Safari, 20% use Firefox and 20% use Internet Explorer. Visitors in May were approximately double that of December. (This is typical every year.)
In 2014, we had visitors from 175 different countries. 76% of our traffic is from United States locations. Canada brings 5%, the UK 2.5%, Australia and Germany each bring 1.6%, and France brings 1%.
There are over 67,000 people who have visited the site more than 100 times in the past year. We had over 111,000 sessions that lasted over 3 minutes, which would indicate that the user found something interesting and spent some time on the site.
2014 was first year I started accessing ATP from my phone on a regular basis, and I'm definitely not the only one. What do people use for accessing ATP: a desktop, tablet or smart phone? I was not surprised to see that tablet and phone use has exploded in the past year, especially since we made our big revamp earlier to make the site friendly for these mobile devices.
In 2013, the numbers looked like this (numbers rounded): Mobile: 12%, Tablet: 10%, Desktop: 77%
In 2014, the numbers are: Mobile: 15%, Tablet, 17%, Desktop: 67%
2015 will certainly see even more phone and tablet use and I'm ready to continue enhancing the site for these devices.
Alright, let's move on from the traffic and move into a topic that might be more interesting: what are people doing on ATP? Let's look at the numbers from the various features of the site.
The only thing better than giving thumbs-ups to other members is getting them for yourself!! When you post a comment or an image and you get a system message notification that so-and-so has given you a thumb, it just feels GOOD. Across the entire site, a whopping 633,405 thumbs ups have been given, spread out to 1,830 different members. 1,474 people have actually given a thumbs-up at least once.
Posts get the most thumbs with 241K. Images in the database have accumulated 153K of these accolades. The most thumbed article so far is
https://garden.org/ideas/view/...
The most thumbed image ever is shown below:
Our number one thumbs giver is
@vic who has given a whopping 23,082 thumbs out!
As you know, in addition to giving thumbs, you can also give acorns. While the former are free to give, giving acorn tips costs you. You are giving acorns from your hard-earned stash over to someone else, in a public way, to reward them for a contribution that you particularly appreciated. I'm not going to add up actual acorn counts, but I will count how many different tips have been given. In other words, we'll look at how many tips are given but we won't consider how costly each tip was.
10,524 acorn tips have been given. 5,093 were for thread posts. 2,658 for articles, and 1,989 for database images.
@SongofJoy is single-handedly responsible for giving out 993 different acorn tips. The most tipped article was
https://garden.org/ideas/view/... with 17 different people giving tips.
We hold raffles most months, and sell tickets for 5 acorns each. Over time we have sold a total of 25,617 tickets, which means that 128,085 acorns have been spent on raffles.
Microbadges are little graphics you can buy for (usually) 5 acorns each. We have 145 different ones and 6,845 have been purchased by 1,110 different members.
Each day the banners on the top of the website changes with a new beautiful banner. These banners have been created and submitted by 86 different members and chosen by
@Calif_Sue, who also has the record of having had 226 banners featured on the site. 2nd place is
@mcash70 with 189 banners, followed by
@Paul2032 with 181 banners. The banners you all contribute make the site lively and fresh every day and we all appreciate the big impact it has on our enjoyment of ATP.
Let's look at forums and threads and then we'll quit. The article with the most comments posted ever is
https://garden.org/ideas/view/... with 735 posts! 2nd place is
https://garden.org/ideas/view/... with 278 posts.
So which thread has been the biggest thread ever? It's where 118 different people posted to it. 2nd place was
The thread "LA Sellers" in
Daylilies forum with 82 posters.
The nice thing about ATP is that our threads are sliced into pages, so that no matter how long a thread is, you don't have to load the entire thing in your browser all at once. You can view it page by page and that makes extremely long threads perfectly manageable. Well, how far has this been taken? Check out
The thread "Hanging sempervivum ball" in
Sempervivum forum which has almost 5,000 replies! At 20 posts per page, that's 250 pages of posts! Imagine printing that out.
Which are our most active forums? Here they are:
Daylilies: 66,792 posts
Sandbox: 40,329
Sempervivum: 37,998
Irises: 35,599
Orchids: 33,250
Site Talk: 22,933
Roses: 22,214
Perennials: 22,158
Lilies: 20,711
In the
Ask a Question area, 1,139 questions have been asked, and 12,293 answers were given.
@RickCorey is the chief here with 532 answers. Who else is posting in the Ask ATP section? Here's the top 10:
@RickCorey: 532 posts
@woofie: 476
@greene: 446
@plantladylin: 440
@dyzzypyxxy: 437
@dave: 406
@drdawg: 381
@valleylynn: 267
@SongofJoy: 243
@flaflwrgrl: 222
So across the entire site, who is posting the most? Here's the top 10 list of the most active members in our threads:
@Newyorkrita: 30,577 posts
@valleylynn: 25,976
@lovemyhouse: 17,709
@flaflwrgrl: 16,588
@dave: 11,560
@mcash70: 10,383
@ge1836: 9,876
@virginiarose: 9,485
@Dutchlady1: 9,199
@plantladylin: 9,116
Well, that's a lot of information and I hope you all found this as interesting as I did. You'll notice that I didn't talk much about the database; that's because we're going to be celebrating the ATP database later this month, so I'm saving up for then. We'll have a similar article during that week, talking about just the database.
Printer friendly version