Also, 4000 users is an underestimate since the majority of people benefit from the EA Forum while logged out (on LW about 10-20% of our traffic comes from logged-in users, my guess is the EA Forum is similar, but not confident), and even daily users are usually not logged in.
You posted this graph
If I understand it correctly, it shows that about 50% of EA forum traffic comes from logged-in users, not 10%-20%.
Also, it seems that EA forum gets about 14,000 views per day. So you spend about $2,000,000/(365*14,000) = $0.4 per view. That’s higher than I would expect.
Note that many of these views might not be productive. For me personally, most of the views are like “I open the frontpage automatically when I want to procrastinate, see that nothing is new & interesting or that I didn’t even want to use the forum, and then close it”. I also sometimes incessantly check if anyone commented or voted on my post or comment, and that sort of behaviour can drive up the view count.
That is definitely relevant data! Looking at the recent dates (and hovering over the exact data at the link where the graphs are from) it looks like its around 60% logged-out, 40% logged in.
I do notice I am surprised by this and kind of want confirmation from the EA Forum team they are not doing some kind of filtering on traffic here. When I compare these numbers naively to the Google Analytics data I have access to for those dates, they seem about 20%-30% too low, and it makes me think there is some filtering going on (though my guess is that 80%-90% logged-out traffic definitely still does not seem representative)
You posted this graph
If I understand it correctly, it shows that about 50% of EA forum traffic comes from logged-in users, not 10%-20%.
Also, it seems that EA forum gets about 14,000 views per day. So you spend about $2,000,000/(365*14,000) = $0.4 per view. That’s higher than I would expect.
Note that many of these views might not be productive. For me personally, most of the views are like “I open the frontpage automatically when I want to procrastinate, see that nothing is new & interesting or that I didn’t even want to use the forum, and then close it”. I also sometimes incessantly check if anyone commented or voted on my post or comment, and that sort of behaviour can drive up the view count.
That is definitely relevant data! Looking at the recent dates (and hovering over the exact data at the link where the graphs are from) it looks like its around 60% logged-out, 40% logged in.
I do notice I am surprised by this and kind of want confirmation from the EA Forum team they are not doing some kind of filtering on traffic here. When I compare these numbers naively to the Google Analytics data I have access to for those dates, they seem about 20%-30% too low, and it makes me think there is some filtering going on (though my guess is that 80%-90% logged-out traffic definitely still does not seem representative)