Watching the Web Numbers

Even the Kansas Curmudgeon watches and keep track of the numbers. Thanks to both of my loyal readers, by the way,  for showing up every day.  ;o)  Just kidding, we’re doing just fine, actually much better than we thought we would. But the numbers can be interesting. It is some sort of an unwritten law, I think, that one does not get too specific about the numbers, but they are thought-provoking in general, too.

It is fun, for example, to see how far down the numbers dip on weekends. It isn’t always a lot, but there is usually a weekend drop-off in visitors. I imagine that it is similar to the summer drop-off, wherein fewer people stop by to visit even their favorite sites when the weather is nice. The summer and weekend reductions in traffic do not make me at all unhappy, though.

What they mean is that people are actually going out somewhere and doing things that don’t involve their computer. Even better, they are probably doing those things with real, genuine, non-virtual people. Don’t get me wrong; there is nothing untoward about having virtual friends. But it is nice to spend some time with people in the real world, too.

This time of year, I would imagine a lot of people are going to football games on the weekend, or watching them on television with friends. And of course, I would guess that a lot of dates still happen on Friday and Saturday nights. In the summer, people are swimming, fishing, boating, and generally just doing outside things. There is certainly nothing wrong with spending time on the internet, but it is nice to see it balanced against spending time doing real things with real people. That is good for us all.

One other side of the numbers is that the hits on my sites are low in the morning, then they head up to a fairly good number between 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon. It quickly dawned upon me that people were doing a lot of afternoon surfing from the office. I’m not sure how that helps productivity, but I’m pretty sure that it will help keep employees sane after five or six hours in a cube.  Why do things like office cubicles come mainly in colors like ecru and putty? Do the surroundings need to be as boring as the jobs?

Then people head home, and hits go way down over the times that are reserved for dinner. After that, the people that don’t watch commercial television start to show up on the Web again. Between nine and eleven, the numbers slowly drift upward, until they reach the highs of the day, usually at 11:00 or midnight. Then they drop off fairly quickly, until the only people really left out there are insomniacs, Stumblers, and people from New Zealand.

The statistic that has me confused is the spike in hits the last few days of the month, which is immediately followed by a drop-off in the number of hits through the first few days of the new month. My current theory is that people are out of money to go out into the real world and do things by the end of the month, then they get paid on the last day of the month and can afford to party hardy for a couple of days. Then it’s back to the same old grind.

Does that sound about right to you?


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