Over on RPGNet, Jürgen Hubert drew attention to some interesting statistic on Google Insights:
1) Google queries for ENWorld declined steadily until mid 2007, followed by an ever steeper climb towards a peak coinciding with 4e's release. However, this peak was actually lower than the 2004 status of olnine interest in ENWorld, and collapsed rapidly to levels even lower than preceding the 4e announcement. Less interest in 4e than expected? The community split? Changing user behaviour (e.g. movement towards blogs, official forums, Penny Arcade, whatever)? Interesting nevertheless.
2) RPGNet: steady but slow decline through the years; very minor bump in 2008 followed by a small valley. The site's fanbase being not that much tied to the D&D cycle, and of course Tangency are probably the reasons why it is a more stable trend.
3) TheRPGSite: peak in 2007, stable through the first half of 2008, declining ever since (I wouldn't call this one conclusive, the differences are not that large).
4) Dragonsfoot: interestingly, it shows a very slight upwards trend; what is more, it generates quite a lot of search queries - compare it to the others.

Obviously not representative, and influenced by all kinds of erratic factors. Still, information of a sort.

Cool, but what sort of person browses Google search statistics for leisure and entertainment?

Oh, wait, economist. Right.

That is very interesting.

ummm... why is it that the #1 location for searches done for therpgsite and rpgnet come from Malaysia?  That's makes me doubt this a lot.

Quote from: Premier;315505Cool, but what sort of person browses Google search statistics for leisure and entertainment?

Oh, wait, economist. Right.

German economist.

Quote from: J Arcane;315523German economist.

What's that suppose to mean?

Er ist gründliche.

Is this stats on searches using google, or stats on actual traffic?!

RPGPundit

Searches on Google.

Premier: coincidentally, both Jürgen Hubert and I are PhD candidates in economics. We dig that stuff.

Im not sure searches can count too hard.

Almost every site I visit is in a bookmark, and has been so as far back as browsing on a Pentium Pro 150 with Windows 95 and 16 megs of ram.

Are there really that many people that don't use bookmarks?

Quote from: Captain Rufus;315787Im not sure searches can count too hard.

Almost every site I visit is in a bookmark

Agreed.  Searches would be more of a measure of new users and rare users who don't have it bookmarked such as someone looking for a review or press release.  

I suspect that more new users (that stay for more than 5 minutes) come through links than searches.

I would expect searches to decline over time, as steady users wouldn't search much after the first time or two.

That's for any site really, or any rpg.

Yes, a decline in the number of searches would not necessarily mean a decline in the site's activity; there could be a lot more searches going on in the early days when a site is going through rapid growth.

This site is doing, traffic-wise, as good as its ever been doing.

RPGPundit

I get here, and all the sites I visit regularly, via google every time. I tend to use book marks for obscure and/or academic sites that I visit infrequently, but know I'll want to get back to and don't want to forget about.

Quote from: Nicephorus;315805Agreed.  Searches would be more of a measure of new users and rare users who don't have it bookmarked such as someone looking for a review or press release.  

On the other hand, from the perspective of an advertiser looking for a site to advertise on, this is exactly the metric that matters. It's not valuable to have an ad hit the same 30 people a thousand times an hour.