UBC Blogs Stats and Growth

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This is inspired by Jim Groom’s recent post. I used to be a little obsessed with stats I did a brief stint doing  the “Internet Marketing” thing back in the heyday so the numbers were very important $$ but now they take on a little different meaning in academia (justification of existence?? which == $$ I guess)…

UBC Blogs in it’s current state (using WordPress MU) has been online since September 2008 the OLT has been hosting blogs for many years prior on a Moveable Type platform. We are currently officially a pilot which means (at least the way I interpret it) we cannot really advertise the service and we hide the account setup/login page… That being said we still have a decent number of users and blogs probably 10% of the user base was migrated over from the old Moveable Type platform the rest are newbies. We have a another server for more VIP sites (basically means mapped domains and custom themes) which sees about the same traffic with only a couple dozen sites.

User and Blogs Growth
This chart is interesting shows the user account growth chart in the system overtime 1438 users and 795 blogs.

Blogs growth

Blogs growth (click for large)

Content Growth.
We ran this a few weeks ago on verf(too much of a hog to run on production) to check the total posts and comments in the system. These numbers go way back to 2004 because some of the old MT blogs were moved into the new system. Still pretty impressive numbers with over 24,000 posts. I am pretty sure this has to be one of the larger websites on campus in terms of number of hosted pages.

blog_posts_total_small

Traffic
We haven’t been using Google Analytics since the start but here are some numbers from this term so far.

Sept-Nov 2009 stats

Sept-Nov 2009 stats

Bounce rate is not the greatest 60% of people leave after visiting one page.

How are people arriving?
traffic_sources_09t1

Top 10 URL’s this term
top10_t1_2009

Interesting that four of the blogs are courses: digitalliteracy2009, etec522sept09, etec540sept09 and micb405 (private).

Where are people coming from? Top 10 visiting countries.

visitor_location

From our web traffic and content growth it seems that this campus “publishing platform” is alive and well and growing at a healthy rate despite being on the down low.

5 thoughts on “UBC Blogs Stats and Growth”

  1. Scott,

    It’s just amazing to me that UBC Blogs is still on the down low. It is shining star in the way you guys have imagined it, brought in the MY blogs, framed the server setup, and developed all kinds of cool plugins. UBC has quietly been doing all the work in WPMu blogging in higher ed, and you guys are obviously being rewarded for you work with a healthy coomunity reflected above. To be honest with you, I’m just afraid what UBC Blogs will become when you actually start promoting it a bit. Kudos to you, Novak, and the whole OLT crew.

  2. OLT get’s the word out through Brian’s talks and some workshops but until we have a CWL login button on the homepage it’s not really open for business I would say. (http://wiki.ubc.ca is growing faster than blogs.ubc.ca during the same time period because we have a login on the homepage…

    We still need to do a little work for scaling up before that point and also implement an easier method to get people into group blogs which we now have (will be rolled out in next upgrade)…

  3. Interesting that micb405 is in the top ten. Feedback from the students has been good – and from my perspective it’s easy to update the site. The only two utilities I see missing- as compared to webct – are the quizes and the marks. For the former, google docs can do the job … but for marks, I am still looking for ideas