Today I’ll talk about where things currently stand, and where our to-do list stands.
First, let’s look at site metrics. There’s traffic. At this time of the year, with Thanksgiving and the Christimas holidays, it makes little sense to look at month-to-month progress. This is just naturally a low-traffic side of the season. So let’s look at year-over-year numbers, and also at November 2011, which was the last time we had a pre-primary November:
|
Nov 2015 |
Nov 2014 |
Nov 2011 |
Unique Visitors |
8.96M |
8.45M |
2.76M |
Pageviews |
44.2M |
38.3M |
20.3M |
Year-over-year, that is a 6 percent increase in visitors, and a 13 percent increase in pageviews. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Bernie-Clinton primary wars are good for pageviews. So all-in-all, modest growth. But virality and news cycle also has something to do with these numbers—last November we had an election and the shooting of Tamir Rice, which spiked traffic. We didn’t have such news spikes this November.
In any case, I’ve been watching to see whether we’d take a traffic hit after the launch of the new site, and so far, I’m not seeing it. That’s not to say that the traffic couldn’t have been higher without the update, who knows? But so far, the worst-case (“Digg”) scenario hasn’t come to pass.
Of course, there is more to metrics than traffic. One area we’re heavily focused on is user engagement: the number of diaries/stories written, comments written, and comments recommended. Here is the chart of stories written:
That October spike was a combination of the Clinton Benghazi hearings, the first Democratic presidential debate, the Roseville, Oregon shooting, the girls slammed by a cop in class in South Carolina, and John Boehner resigning. That was a crazy news month.
But take that month out, and the number of stories now written is about 5-10 percent higher than it was pre-DK5. We’re now hovering in the 370-400 per day, while before we hovered around 330-370. As we further work out the kinks, we hope to see that improve even further.
Another big one is comments, and here’s our chart:
Here we can definitely see a hit, going from 12-13,000 a day, to around 10-11,000 per day, or roughly a 15 percent decline. Part of it was the Thanksgiving and holiday season (you can see the Turkey Dip on the chart), but there’s no doubt that commenting is down because of the port.
That’s where a big chunk of our development focus is right now. We’ve already tweaked font legibility, and the layout of the story page is changing in a way that will eliminate the left white gutter (I sketched it out here). The hope is to get this out before the end of the year, but understand that we are in prime vacation time for our staff (and we have been since late November), so that slows things down in general.
Also related to comments are comment recommends:
We are down from around 10,000 an average day, to between 8-9,000. This was likely our biggest design miss, making the action line on the comments too small, dim and confusing. Our current tweaks including creating actual buttons for recommend and flag, to make it easier for people to see and use them correctly (we’ve also seen accidental flags increase a large amount).
So what is the State of Daily Kos? We’ve survived the transition without mass catastrophe, but we still have lots of work smoothing things over (not that we ever thought it would be otherwise). So where are we on development?
I previously identified these as our top priorities: New story layout page, speed improvements, single-comment page, story/diary list-view page, text legibility, collapsible sidebar boxes, and collapsing of all comments. Here’s where things stand:
New story layout page. In heavy development, pretty confident we’ll be done by end of year. I’m being told sooner, but things happen, so let’s say EOY 2015.
Speed improvements. This has gotten more effort than anything else since the transition. We’ve tried several things that just didn’t pan out. This site is incredibly complex, with myriad moving parts, and off-the-shelf tools we tried didn’t play well with our setup. But if progress on other priorities seems slower than you’d like, it’s because we have the most developer manpower tied up on this.
Single-comment page. High priority, but won’t launch until January.
Story/diary list-view page. We did a quick and easy hack, linking to the old site list view. We’re also working on a little icon toggle so people can switch back and forth between the views. Next year, we’ll have a nicer designed version of the list view, but for now we went with the fastest way to get you what you wanted.
Text legibility. We boosted the size of the font, making it far more legible. We are also removing the left white gutter in comments as part of that new story layout page, so that should also help reduce the amount of white people are seeing.
Collapsible sidebar boxes. Development is finished and tested, just waiting on the next big deploy to get them up. So super soon!
Collapsing of all comments. Development is finished, still need to test, but either way, it’s coming soon and just waiting our next big deploy.
So in short, the single-comment page and speed improvements will push out into next year, but everything else should be up by the end of the year. Also note that the team has been squashing untold number of functionality bugs. They don’t get much attention (unless you’re one of the people affected by those bugs), but they are obviously important and a time suck.
We’re as eager to wrap up these loose ends as you are, as we have an ambitious list of other things we want to get to (better search, better internal messaging, user story metrics, etc).