Haiku Websites Stats and Other Trivia

So far this year, the Haiku website has received close to 1 million page views (925,302 to be exact). About half of those are from February, and this surge can be attributed to our presence at the SCaLE conference and the exposure that ensued soon after in mainstream sites like ARS Technica and Slashdot. As a matter of fact, on February 12 alone (the day right after SCaLE), traffic peaked at 94K page views, more than ten times the daily average back then. Even if we were to consider this an isolated incident and disregarded the post-SCaLE surge, we would still see an upward trend of every metric over this period of three months. For example, in terms of absolute visitors, we have gone from 42K in January to 52K in March. In spite of having received broad coverage on many sites, including a few mainstream ones, OSNews is still the top referring site with about 20% of the traffic for this period.

Then there is haiku-files.org. This is a nightly build archive, so there is not much to track in this site other than the number of times the nightly images have been downloaded. I have to be honest that I had no idea what to expect in terms of downloads here, but the numbers turned out to be quite impressive. We started with about 12K downloads in January, only to reach as many as 52K downloads in March. Needless to say, this marked increase can be attributed to the heightened interest in Haiku development as a result of the recent important milestones achieved by the Haiku devs in their pursue for the first alpha release. Our participation in the Google Summer of Code also seemed to have effect in traffic towards the end of March, but it is not significant overall (it may turn out to have a bigger impact in the month of April). Anyway, for the whole 2008 Q1 period, the nightly images were downloaded a total of 105,742 times. Who would have guessed! (Note: This is not the number of page views; we are actually counting the number of times a .zip or .bz2 file is requested. These stats are not from GA, but provided by our ISP.)

I have created a GA report for this period that you can download from here (15 page PDF). For those who prefer to see just the important numbers at a glance, I have also created a simple one-page report that shows the monthly trends for haiku-files.org (number of downloads) and haiku-os.org (number of visits, unique visitors and page views).