What did freitasm do to drive away the Yanks? (Geekzone Dashboard comments)

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Dynamic

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#199251 10-Aug-2016 10:47

I hadn't spotted the Geekzone Dashboard before now (in the Site Features area at the bottom of the page), and had a quick poke around. That PowerBI is pretty impressive.

I was interested to see that traffic from the USA was quite high, but trying different filters by year, I see the US traffic really drops off around 2011. I had wondered whether the NZ traffic increased significantly to drown the US traffic, but it looks to me (with an in-depth analysis involving a 60 second fiddle with the filters) more like the US traffic slowed down.

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#1607499 10-Aug-2016 11:07

I will explain when in front of a laptop. Dislike phones for long posts.

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#1607501 10-Aug-2016 11:09

It was probably the no nukes badge they all received for posting from the USA.

freitasm

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#1607526 10-Aug-2016 12:09

First off, very good work finding out that the numbers you see on the PowerBI Dashboard are the entire dataset since we started using Google Analytics. You have to filter by year to see exactly what it is now.

You have too at the data from Google Analytics (countries and browsers) and at the data in the other pages (popular forums) to find what happened.

Ohter pages of that dashboard are data queried from our database and updated every few hours. If you filter that data by year and look at what forums were popular back in 2003 and what forums are popular in 2016 you will know exactly what happened.

When we created Geekzone "technology" and "geeks" were not a big deal in New Zealand. Back in 2002 56Kbps modems were still popular, 128 Kbps DSL connections were fast, 2Mbps cable connection was a service reserved for Wellington only, mobile data connections were still CSD and only around that time GPRS was being introduced in the mix. Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Palm OS were the dominant smart devices.

People in New zealand had low expectations of technologies and how those could change our lives. Filter that data by year and you will see which forums they visited most back in 2003 and what was visited most in 2016. You will see a huge increase in the broadband forums, home workshop, home threate, online streaming, desktop computing.

New Zealanders are now more aware of technology than before.

At the same time I used to post a lot about US-focused companies and services back then. A niche that was slowly filled by Engadget, Gizmodo and others. So they take the US traffic, we take the NZ traffic... This obviously has other consequences - our advertising revenue reduced a lot - even though we serve millions more pages now than before but it seems New Zealand advertisers pay less than US advertisers. Also ad blockers increased from 0% to 40%. People moved from using Internet Explorer to Chrome and Firefox (just look at those browser stats to see how different it's now).

All very interesting.

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#1608517 10-Aug-2016 12:40

Wow... you've obviously spent a bit of time with these numbers.

I see your point about the 'topics by forum' page showing an interesting change over time.... the rise and fall of Symbian and Palm, Windows Phone interest coming and going, etc. The Votes by Forum suggests the Off Topic users are an enthusiastic bunch.

Browser stats are interesting in that Safari's use is far higher in the early days than I would have expected.... and documents Chrome's rapid rise at least with the more technologically-capable Kiwis that use Geekzone.

johnr's infamy lives on in the Votes for User graph. :)

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#1608530 10-Aug-2016 13:04

That dashboard alone is a treasure of data for marketing people. But there's so much more we can do. We have millions of data logged for every activity around the site. I want to explore and more of those in the future.

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#1608573 10-Aug-2016 13:35

Observations:

- "Ave Users Per Topic" (page 3) - the most popular topic seems to be about transport (e.g. cars). You could've make serious money on the car dealers for that reason :-)

- "Votes for User" (page 4) - In my opinioin the best System Administrator is the one who works 30 minutes a day and the rest of the time just keeps an eye on the business running by itself and hence have time to post (and receive votes). For that reason and knowing who are Sys Admins on that list - you can tell who have spare time and surely the best of the best. If I were their employer I would give them huge bonus (once) just because they are in the top ten... The drawback is that your employer may misinterpret that and think that you have nothing to do and cut your salary... :-)