How many people in the world currently read DCUM?

[Anonymous]

Just curious, how many people do you think read DCUM these days? Are you able to tell? Can you get a sense of the geography of DCUM, meaning where do people who post are located generally in the world?

[jsteele]

Yes, I have pretty good statistics. Almost all users are in the U.S. with a handful from Canada and a few other places. Within the U.S, most are in the DC area, though we have large communities elsewhere, particularly New York City and Los Angeles.

As for numbers, they fluctuate a lot. Several months ago we were over a million unique users a month. However, Google switched to provided AI responses and it caused a massive drop in traffic. So we are less than half that now. However, it has always been the case that we had two types of users: the dedicated users who come frequently and users who come via a search engine and only look at a page or two and then disappear. The users we lot are mostly in the second group. We still have our dedicated users. The result is that have lost a ton of traffic, ad revenue basically stayed the same and our page views are only slightly less than before.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:Yes, I have pretty good statistics. Almost all users are in the U.S. with a handful from Canada and a few other places. Within the U.S, most are in the DC area, though we have large communities elsewhere, particularly New York City and Los Angeles.

As for numbers, they fluctuate a lot. Several months ago we were over a million unique users a month. However, Google switched to provided AI responses and it caused a massive drop in traffic. So we are less than half that now. However, it has always been the case that we had two types of users: the dedicated users who come frequently and users who come via a search engine and only look at a page or two and then disappear. The users we lot are mostly in the second group. We still have our dedicated users. The result is that have lost a ton of traffic, ad revenue basically stayed the same and our page views are only slightly less than before.

That’s neat. I am glad the dedicated users keep the ad revenue the same. I accidentally came upon DCUM a decade ago. I am in the Canadian category. Maybe it’s because I travelled to DC for conferences and research. I hope to travel to the US for work again, but not right now.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:Yes, I have pretty good statistics. Almost all users are in the U.S. with a handful from Canada and a few other places. Within the U.S, most are in the DC area, though we have large communities elsewhere, particularly New York City and Los Angeles.

As for numbers, they fluctuate a lot. Several months ago we were over a million unique users a month. However, Google switched to provided AI responses and it caused a massive drop in traffic. So we are less than half that now. However, it has always been the case that we had two types of users: the dedicated users who come frequently and users who come via a search engine and only look at a page or two and then disappear. The users we lot are mostly in the second group. We still have our dedicated users. The result is that have lost a ton of traffic, ad revenue basically stayed the same and our page views are only slightly less than before.

Is a user counted more than once if they use different machines and/or various networks to browse? Ex. user that uses laptop or iPad (wi-fi), phone (cellular 5G), and say a work computer (office wi-fi/vpn) during the work day would be consider three (or even more users depending on cookies and networks used)?

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:Yes, I have pretty good statistics. Almost all users are in the U.S. with a handful from Canada and a few other places. Within the U.S, most are in the DC area, though we have large communities elsewhere, particularly New York City and Los Angeles.

As for numbers, they fluctuate a lot. Several months ago we were over a million unique users a month. However, Google switched to provided AI responses and it caused a massive drop in traffic. So we are less than half that now. However, it has always been the case that we had two types of users: the dedicated users who come frequently and users who come via a search engine and only look at a page or two and then disappear. The users we lot are mostly in the second group. We still have our dedicated users. The result is that have lost a ton of traffic, ad revenue basically stayed the same and our page views are only slightly less than before.

Is a user counted more than once if they use different machines and/or various networks to browse? Ex. user that uses laptop or iPad (wi-fi), phone (cellular 5G), and say a work computer (office wi-fi/vpn) during the work day would be consider three (or even more users depending on cookies and networks used)?

The stats are compiled by Google Analytics and I don't know how they come up with this metric. But it is pretty universally used across the Internet.

[Anonymous]

Could some of the users originate from elsewhere in the world but with VPN, show up as American?

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Could some of the users originate from elsewhere in the world but with VPN, show up as American?

In theory but we have so few foreign users that it would be a minuscule number that meets this criteria.

[Anonymous]

It is the second group (from search engines) who keep bumping threads from many years ago, because they don’t notice dates before posting.