How many people read this comic???

[lemmor]

Last Monday, this forum was shut down in the meantime the new comic was read by so many people that, I supose, can crash the server... So any of you can say how many readers this webcomic can gather in an update??? Does it have a 'Niesel rating' for last monday??? if so, which episode has had the highest 'rating'???... just wondering...

[Da Luniz]

1 more than needed to crash the forums

[Icewalker]

Yeah, there are loads of people who read it. Just check out the rate of posting on the OOTS section of the forum, it's impressive. and think about how many people must read it and not get on the forums?

And (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0082.html) honestly (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0423.html), from (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0353.html) OOTS (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0377.html), can (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0160.html) you (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0102.html) expect (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0201.html) otherwise (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0188.html)?

[Balathustrius]

There are also lots of OotS discussion threads on other D&D boards.

I was wondering this, too - just how much traffic does this site get? There's a mention of a server upgrade on the news page somewhere, I think, and still the server is overloaded when a new comic is posted. :smalleek:

[Avatar God]

I'm sure someone keeps a hit counter - it'd be cool to see the unique hits!

And like Icewalker said, the posting rate is crazy here. I've never seen a forum like this.

And no, I couldn't expect otherwise :smallsmile:

[factotum]

Probably about 23, but the comic server is a Commodore 64. :smallwink:

[Effovex]

According to Alexa, giantitp.com is read by about 0,016% of web users, and it has a ranking of 5652 over the last 3 months. In comparison, penny-arcade gets 0,0475% of web users and has a traffic ranking of 2,251.

My estimate is: a bit above 100,000 readers for GITP, most of which must come here for OOTS. Possibly up to 150,000.

[Zictor]

Doesn't really surprise me.

The comic is amazing

[The Giant]

According to Alexa, giantitp.com is read by about 0,016% of web users, and it has a ranking of 5652 over the last 3 months. In comparison, penny-arcade gets 0,0475% of web users and has a traffic ranking of 2,251.

My estimate is: a bit above 100,000 readers for GITP, most of which must come here for OOTS. Possibly up to 150,000.

This is low. We get about 210,000 unique visitors per day. Only a fraction use the message boards, but the message boards use up a disproportionate amount of the server resources.

[Deckmaster]

Gah! The Giant speaks!

And, yeah, I thought it was something like that.

[RobbyPants]

What I wonder is how fast it's growing. Everytime I wear one of my Belkar shirts out of the house, someone's asking me about it, and somewhere in the conversation, I end up giving them the web page. Mentions of OOTS come up more often in D&D, and everyone in my group reads it now. I know of a few people that are interested that don't play. I bet each year (or even month), they get a pretty decent increase in the number of people that come...

[brian c]

This is low. We get about 210,000 unique visitors per day. Only a fraction use the message boards, but the message boards use up a disproportionate amount of the server resources.

All Hail the Giant and his 210,000 unique visitors!

Seriously though, the site has been very slow lately, even when there's no new comic (and even when no new comic is expected). You need some sort of server upgrade; I'm willing to pitch in however much $ you get from me buying Start of Darkness in order to help you buy it; by which I mean I'll buy the book and you will be compensated financially. Deal?

[brian c]

This is low. We get about 210,000 unique visitors per day. Only a fraction use the message boards, but the message boards use up a disproportionate amount of the server resources.

All Hail the Giant and his 210,000 unique visitors!

Seriously though, the site has been very slow lately, even when there's no new comic (and even when no new comic is expected). You need some sort of server upgrade; I'm willing to pitch in however much $ you get from me buying Start of Darkness in order to help you buy it; by which I mean I'll buy the book and you will be compensated financially. Deal?

[brian c]

This is low. We get about 210,000 unique visitors per day. Only a fraction use the message boards, but the message boards use up a disproportionate amount of the server resources.

All Hail the Giant and his 210,000 unique visitors!

Seriously though, the site has been very slow lately, even when there's no new comic (and even when no new comic is expected). You need some sort of server upgrade; I'm willing to pitch in however much $ you get from me buying Start of Darkness in order to help you buy it; by which I mean I'll buy the book and you will be compensated financially. Deal?

[Zictor]

210.000?

Good numbers!

[One Skunk Todd]

Darn those message board users and their unfair disproportionate use of... oh, wait, nevermind.

[Magistrate]

Enough to cause bandwidth issues apparently.. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing!

[Imperator]

Thats an amazing number of people!:smalleek:

It also pretty annoying. I was waiting for ages to see the site yesterday before the forums were disabled.

[David Argall]

This is low. We get about 210,000 unique visitors per day. Only a fraction use the message boards, but the message boards use up a disproportionate amount of the server resources.

It may be time to impose a maximum posts per day per person. A casual look says that some people are averaging 10 posts a day, so limiting them to a max of 5-10 might do the trick without causing much objection. [And clearly objectionable is the alternative of dull strips we don't want to post about.]
Of course I am not going to object to getting a bigger server.

[Moik]

Viewing the comic is a read function of maybe twenty files, and one or two queries. to check sidebar stuff and what comic you're on.

Using the forums takes both read and write functionality, and can use hundreds of lines of code with almost as many quesries since it can require identity verification, saving stat changes, wordfilter, etc, and has dozens of more files it needs to check as a result (including more interface graphics and a number of avatars than take just as much bandwidth as a single comic, depending on the thread).

It's a nuisance simply because it's avoidable if people were less spammy in the comic's sticky thread, and making the herd of redundant stand-alone threads.

[Shadow of the Sun]

Limiting post is no. It will get you massacred by the people who are compulsive Townies.

I run up over 50 posts per day in the Town, at least.

[cavalier973]

Limiting post is no. It will get you massacred by the people who are compulsive Townies.

I run up over 50 posts per day in the Town, at least.

Wait. . .what Town? There's a Town?

[Baalzebub]

This is low. We get about 210,000 unique visitors per day. Only a fraction use the message boards, but the message boards use up a disproportionate amount of the server resources.

I'm on Mexico and not too many people reads it. Most of my friends know about the comic, but only two of us read it daily. So, from where I see it, 90% of those 210,000 visitors are from the USA (because I have seen posts from people in China and other parts too) I don't know if Rich can give us an estimated of that.

Anyway, 210,000 visitors per day is simply amazing. And that's an average! Any records Rich??

[Tempus Thales]

Probably about 23, but the comic server is a Commodore 64. :smallwink:

Hey now, if the Giant, in his infinite wisdom, decided to run the server on a C-64... well heck, we'd have cool things like sprites... and a 5.25" floppy drive...

Cool stuff like that.... but no HD (who needs one anyway?).


Adept by EA... now that was a good game.


Oh, and just so I'm on topic......oh well, too late for that.

[Kyjibo]

The best method to eliminate the issues between the server and the forum are to host the forum independently of the rest of the site. This would probably be more expensive than getting a single better server though.

[selfcritical]

According to Alexa, giantitp.com is read by about 0,016% of web users, and it has a ranking of 5652 over the last 3 months. In comparison, penny-arcade gets 0,0475% of web users and has a traffic ranking of 2,251.

My estimate is: a bit above 100,000 readers for GITP, most of which must come here for OOTS. Possibly up to 150,000.

To give you an idea of comparison, it's highly likely that a front-page link from penny arcade would crash the site in under an hour.

[Teloric]

There are 2 kinds of people in the world, those that read the Order of the Stick, and those that should read the Order of the Stick...:smallbiggrin:

[Bad Luck]

This is low. We get about 210,000 unique visitors per day. Only a fraction use the message boards, but the message boards use up a disproportionate amount of the server resources.

If you don't mind my asking, how many unique visitors do you get per month then? Is that just an aggregate of the above?

[Jawajoey]

Very nice numbers.

I see someone already went to Alexa before me, but just for references, 5,000 is REALLY good.

Some perspective:
Google: 3
Myspace: 5
Wikipedia: 10
Amazon: 153
Penny Arcade: 2,260
Giant in the Playground: 5,735
StarWars.com: 6,054
maddox.xmission.com (The Best Page in the Universe): 8,709
Megatokyo: 12,031
Least I Could Do: 13,339
The Hypertext d20 SRD: 41, 609

Anything under 100,000 is considered quite good.

[Tobz]

I'm on Mexico and not too many people reads it. Most of my friends know about the comic, but only two of us read it daily. So, from where I see it, 90% of those 210,000 visitors are from the USA (because I have seen posts from people in China and other parts too) I don't know if Rich can give us an estimated of that.

Anyway, 210,000 visitors per day is simply amazing. And that's an average! Any records Rich??

From Alexa:

1. USA 41,1%
2. Germany 6.6%
3. UK 5.8%
4. Brazil 5%
5. Canada 4%

So hardly 90%

[Alex Kidd]

What I want to know is what the hell happened to XKCD (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=xkcd.com) on May 10th?

[zenock]

210,000... :smallcool: ... they are the lucky ones! :smallbiggrin:

[Rincewind]

20 or 30 people, MAX. oh wait that was 3 years ago...
20.000 30.000 people I presume... Rich really needs to move to new servers and take huge amount of ads everywhere :D

[the_tick_rules]

not enough.

[JustMe]

Because it isn't overly-technical I'd say a lot more people read the commic than die-hard role-players. For instance, I only played role-play games in school, but I enjoy reading the commic.

[Iron_Saviour]

well.... the amount of people who read this comic is summed up in this algeba equation:

P= everyone else who reads this comic + me

Where P is number of people who read this comic.

[brian c]

What I want to know is what the hell happened to XKCD (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=xkcd.com) on May 10th?

i think it got farked (ie, a link from Fark.com)