I don’t know exactly how all those online shops do during the Christmas seasons (probably they are blooming), but I can show you what two weeks or so of Christmas and New Year’s holidays can do to one’s blog statistics. Here is a screenshot of weekly stats for my blog:
X-axis shows a few last weeks of 2007 as well as a couple of weeks of 2008. Y-axis shows the number of visits this blog had for each of those weeks. A home-made red marker with a word “here” tries to bring your attention to the celebration of Christmas and New Year represented on this graph.
As much as it was expected, that was quite a dive I must say. Reasons? I’d say there are only two:
- Many people are busy with shopping, celebrations, travels, and other holiday matters. Mostly off-line.
- Many companies closed their offices and that minimized many employees’ access to the Web.
Gladly, things are rushing back to normal.
It would be interesting to see reverse statistics: your visits of the other people’s blogs and other websites around X-mas and NYr. Is it seasonal too?
Well, there might be some correlation. Usually, the web is more silent during the Christmas holidays. At least those sites that I frequently visit. With less news and more time on my hands, I process my reading queue much faster. Then I need more. And then I go to web sites which I usually don’t have the time to visit. Dooce and Dilbert Blog are the ones that come to mind.