By BrianC
April 1 2005

A record month in March 2005 was capped by our busiest ever day yesterday, 31st March. At least one aspect of London Irish is thriving, your site.

March 2005 was a record month, some 35,000 different visitors made 369,000 hits. Yesterday was our busiest day on record with 27.5k hits.

Site hits taken on their own are a pretty meaningless figure. Where they are however relevant is if they are used in comparison to a previous set of figures. In the first quartile of this year we have had 971k hits. In the same period last year the figure was 759k. It can thus quite safely be said that The Craic’s traffic is currently up 27.9% on last year. Going further back, in 2003 we had 548k hits in the same period. Our traffic is thus 77.1% up over the two years.

Who are our visitors? We only have poll evidence to go on, from this and other sites. That has been fairly static down the years and would indicate that 85%-90% of those who view this site are London Irish supporters. Given that in the last month we only had 325 different people posting on the messageboard it would indicate that lurkers outnumber posters by a factor of about a hundred to one.

One area that continues to please me is the growth in our story hits. If anything we have had fewer new stories this year than last. Two of your three co-eds have been much busier with real work in the past twelve months. These figures are however 46.2% up on the same period last year. This I believe is down to the fact that as the content and archives on the site continue to increase, so does their use. From the very start The Craic has made a point in obtaining and archiving a report on every competitive first team game. Our firm belief being that this is our club’s history in the making.

One other thing that has been noticeable is that the number of unique IP addresses we are seeing is growing even faster than hits. I don’t have the historic figures but would estimate that the growth in this is close to 50% over last year. This I believe can largely be attributed to the increasing use of broadband over dial-up ISP connections.

Given the growth we have seen and are continuing to see, for all the criticism we take, I can only assume that we must be doing something right.