Tag: statistics

On pseudovariety

Kottke has a link to an interesting article, with much more interesting visualization of soft drinks industry.  The article discusses pseudovariety.  That’s when you think you have a lot of something, when indeed you really don’t.  Like with all those soft drinks on the shelves of every supermarket.  You think there is a whole lot of them, when in fact most of them are brands of either one of the three major companies.

One other example of pseudovariety that came to my mind was from the field of politics.  Think about it.  There are usually a number of political parties and presidential candidates at every election.  All of them spend hours and millions of dollars to promote themselves, demote their competition, and explain to you how different they are from everything you’ve seen to this day.  But in reality, most of them are pretty much the same.  You can see it from the way they talk, the way they work, the way they lie, the way they approach difficult problems, and the way they talk about simple things.

It often seems like you have so much to choose from, when in fact, you really don’t.

Front page design is overrated

I was looking through my website statistics yesterday and I arrived to this decision – front page design is overrated.  There are, of course, different circumstances and such, but overall, I think this should be true for pretty much every content-based website, except the monsters like CNN.  If you are CNN, then, I guess, people just come to your front page to check up on things.  But if you are not CNN, or some other huge news outlet, chances are, you’ll get most of your visitors from the search engines.  And if that’s true, then I bet your front-page won’t be the landing page for all those visitors.  They will come directly to content pages, like articles, products, and so on.

Consider an example.  Yesterday, this blog saw 593 unique visitors.  The front page was seen by only 46.  That’s less than 8%!  Of course, days are different, and each website is different in its own way.  But I think that in general the correlation between the numbers will be somewhere there.  Around 10% of visitors will check your front page.  Most of them will check the landing page and leave (what’s your bounce rate?  70-80%?).  Some will continue to “Contact Us”, “Related Posts”, “Similar Products”, or search.  And then more of them will leave.  A few of those, who are still there, will probably check the front page by now.  By which time they probably already got what they wanted out of your website or lost all hopes.  No matter how beautiful your front page is, they are likely to leave now.  Dont’ think so?  What’s the average pages per visit metric for your website?  1.5-2?  There you go.

So, don’t bother too much about the front page.  Yes, it is nice to have a cool one.  Yes, it might be important for those direct visitors.  But if you are on a tight schedule or budget, concentrate on improving your content pages.

Ad CTR ratio by browser

Download Squad attempts to analyze a recent report about advertising click-through rate (CTR) ratio based on different browsers.  Apparently, more than 40 million impressions were used as the data for this report, and Opera and MSIE users came on top – they click the most ads.  Firefox and Chrome users are further down the list, and Safari users are at the bottom.

I think this chart makes a lot of sense.  While there are ad-blocking solutions for both Opera and MSIE, neither one of this browsers has a healthy plugin ecosystem.  In other words, even if there are ways to filter ads in these browsers, most users don’t know how to do it or simply don’t care enough.  Both Firefox and Chrome browsers are blossoming with addons and extensions which filter all ads, known ads, annoying ads, flash ads, ads on specific websites, ads of specific sizes, and so on and so forth.  In fact, I don’t know any Firefox or Chrome user who doesn’t have some sort of ad-filtering extension installed.

That leaves us with Safari.  Why Safari users are clicking the least ads?  I don’t know.  I’m thinking that might be a statistical inaccuracy or something along those lines.  Or maybe they all are just broke from buying all those Apple products and have no interest in ads no more.  Who knows?

Red Hat contributions to Gnome

Via this rant, I learned about this report, which shows who contributes the most to the Gnome project.  I knew that Red Hat was doing a lot of Gnome, but I never knew how much it actually was.

Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.

Way to go, Red Hat!