By BrianC
August 10 2005

Your site was born on Saturday 10th August 2002 at Henley. Today is it’s third birthday. The three years have seen their fair share of controversy. There have been ups and downs but the overall pattern is one of steady, strong growth. There are two ways of measuring the success of any website, hits and unique IP addresses visited.

Hits, counted each time a page on the site is viewed, if taken on their own are a pretty meaningless statistic. Where they do have relevance however is in comparing like for like. In 2003, our first full calendar year, The Craic had 2.3 million hits, last year it had 2.8. Thus far this year we are already approaching 2.5 million, it looks like the year-end figure will be in excess of 3.5.

As with all Internet statistics the figures behind “unique IP addresses” are a bit woolly. The general consensus is that for each IP address there are about three different readers. How is this figure reached? On the negative side there are a number of single readers who will use two or more unique IP addresses per day, most commonly their home and work computers. The positive factors come in three main forms. It is very likely that a single PC at home will have more than one person in the household reading this site. Large companies will access the net via a single proxy server so it is very possible that we could have 50 different readers in, for example, Microsoft’s office in Reading who just register as a single IP address. Last but not least ISP’s will often present huge numbers of people to us as a single IP address.

On an average weekday we currently record between 1000 and 1200 unique IP addresses. It can thus be determined that we have somewhere between 3 and 3.5 thousand different visitors per day. In a normal month we will see somewhere in excess of 10,000 unique IP addresses or over 30,000 different visitors. Poll evidence indicates that 85%-90% of these visitors are London Irish supporters.

In recent months we have been able to see how many people read the individual stories we publish. The most popular ones, not surprisingly, are those which attract the interest of all clubs supporters. In our case by far the most popular articles have been the two leading statistics stories ‘Whither Rugby 04/05’ and ‘Club by Club Comparison’. Some have complained that they find the statistics stories of no interest. Here, if proof were needed, it can be shown that there is a ready audience.

Down the years we have come in for our share of criticism. Some of it has no doubt been justified, other less so. For all that we must be doing something right. These ever increasing numbers don’t happen by accident.