From Ken Adachi <Editor>
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/EYreadershipoctoberspike4nov06.shtml
November 4, 2006

[Update: November 6, 2006. A day after posting this note, I got an e-mail from a person who said that I misunderstood the meaning of Alexa's Daily Reach graph. He said that it meant 60 viewers per million. That didn't make sense to me because I knew my hit counter registers closer to 2 milliion hits monthly, yet I knew the graph didn't indicate 60 million daily hits either. So what eactly is Daily Reach? I finally figured it out by going to alexa.com's Help page and read the definition of Daily Reach (posted below). After thinking about it, I now believe I understand what the graphs shown below represent. The left margin of the Daily Reach graph goes from 0  to 100. I had previously assumed that this range represented "millions' because the parentheses at the top of the graph said "(per million)". I now see that this range represents a percentage from 0-100 . So "60" on the chart represents 60% per million, meaning that 600,000 of those one million random internet surfers would vist my site. I'm assuming that it's a projected number based on several factors, rather than an actual hit count. OK, now that we got that out of the way, you can read my original posting..Ken]

I only found out last year ago that you could get an idea of how much traffic your web site was enjoying world wide by going to http://alexa.com   You put the name of a web site into their search box and you can find out all kinds of statistics about ranking status with reference to every other web site on the internet. For example, yahoo.com has a ranking of "1" which means that it's the most popularly viewed web site on the internet. If you click on their link for "traffic details" you can find a Daily Reach graph which plots your traffic activity for the past week, month, six month period, 1 year, 3 year, or 5 year period. .

Since 2005, the traffic for my web site, www.educate-yourself.org, tended to fluctuate between 20-40 million daily reach, with some periods dipping into the 10-20 million range. In looking at the Daily Reach graph today, I noticed that I got a spike up to 60 for a couple of days in mid October. I have no idea what accounted for that, but I did notice that I had posted some new photos of Sylphs about that time and that may have had something to do with it. In looking back at the graphs that covered the past 1 year, 3 year and 5 year period, I was surprised to see that I had gotten a similar 60 million spike each year going back to 2002! Holy Cow, who knew?

Here is how www.alexa.com defines Daily Reach:

http://www.alexa.com/site/help/traffic_learn_more#reach

What is Reach?

Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of users per million. Alexa's one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on their reach. The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current reach and reach rank with its values from three month ago.

Daily Reach graph for www.educate-yourself.org for October 1-31, 2006

Daily Reach graph for www.educate-yourself.org from 2004-2006

Daily Reach graph for www.educate-yourself.org from 2002-2006

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