The other day I had a discussion with one of my webmaster friends about how “successful” his, mine and other websites or communities are. This led into another argument discussion about how “successful” or “popular” is, or should be defined. It was funny how strongly we disagreed on what should be one of the most fundamental and common ideas amongst all webmasters.
His argument is that you measure a community’s success by:
- total number of members
- total earnings
My argument is that one should measure the success of a community (or, website) by:
- daily posts/member involvement
- daily traffic
- total earnings
We both agree that earnings is an important metric, but in my opinion, total number of members is meaningless – and of course, then I had to draw a picture as to why the member count is totally irrelevant and usually meaningless… Which I will now share with you.
If you run a Drupal community (probably the same with other systems, but i dunno), and you look at your membership data very closely, you will no doubt realize that a very, VERY high percentage of your so-called members are nothing more than spam-bots. They may not actually leave any spam, but they are nothing more than a waste of your bits. Don’t believe me? Use the TROLL module and check the IP’s that they use – are they all from India, Korea, or Linux servers? If you don’t require email validation, do they even have valid email addresses? If you do use email validation, how many of them have actually validated their account? How many of these accounts have ever made a post, or even been back to the site?
Since the beginning, I have always taken a hard-stance against these useless/fake accounts. Of course we block many servers and proxies and use other tools like Bad Behavior and TROLL to block many of these bots. We also use the Inactive User module to send warnings to inactive users which will hopefully bring them back to the site, but then deletes the accounts if they ignore the pleas to return to the site. Another trick we use is to add an additional required-field to the basic Drupal user-profile – this will stop many bots cold for months. After a while (6-12 months) the bots will figure out what to type in to that field, so I just change the field-name every few months and the bots get all confused again. You can also use a CAPTCHA in the membership signup page but I have found that most bots laugh at captchas and dont even slow down.
So if the total number of members is meaningless on it’s own, what is important to determine how “popular” or successful your website or community is? The answer to that depends on what is most important to you:
To many webmasters/community owners (myself included) the most critical metric is how active the community is: How many posts/comments are made per day. For a website like GrownUpGeek.com, this is difficult because it attracts people that are new to computers and to the internet, and they often are not comfortable making posts. It is important how active the community is not only because it clearly demonstrates that the community is alive and thriving, but also because it is that activity that is generating content which will in turn (hopefully) generate traffic and/or earnings – other important metrics.
Other webmasters or community owners may use traffic (unique visitors or page views) as ‘the’ measure of success or popularity. This is a good measure, but (to me) should not be the most important metric. Although more traffic usually translates into more members (which we now know does not matter), more earnings (yet, not always), and hopefully more activity, traffic alone should not be considered the most important metric.
Of course, if your website generates income, then total earnings may be what is most important to you regardless of how much traffic, members, or activity you have. This is fine, except without activity or traffic, over time your earnings will surely suffer – meaning that even if earnings are a high priority to you, activity and traffic should be more important to ensure your earnings over the long-run.
In the end, I won the argument. Either because I’m right, or louder.
What is your most important metric for determining the success of your website or when comparing to other sites?
