1,000,000 Hits

Sankaku Complex has attained the next somewhat arbitrary milestone of a million hits; it seems not so long ago that we were celebrating our one hundred thousandth page view (in fact it wasn’t), and traffic continues to grow steadily in line with expectations.

The site itself is becoming larger, more sophisticated, and more usable, something which recently got a dramatic increase with the addition of the Danbooru based Sankaku Channel, sure to correct many of the deficiencies with the visual side of things, and to strengthen the community aspect of the site.

Naturally, I should at this juncture proffer my thanks to you, the users, and to the innumerable sites kind enough to link here; this I shall do in more detail below. With it being something of a major milestone, allow me to go into more detail in a number of areas, and provide some site statistics which may be of interest.

The statistics I will be using here are those from Google Analytics; they have various strengths and weaknesses, but since we are looking at the entire history of the site, consistency is a requisite. Later I will likely shift to AWstats, but these will more than suffice here. I will refrain from Alexa usage as their statistics are at severe variance from any of my data.

Daily visits from the site going live (around April 20th, 2008). There are plenty of other numbers, but for the sake of consistency I shall stick with this. The hardest part was undoubtedly the initial stages of slow growth with minimal numbers of visitors. I can see how many would become perturbed by such a period, and give up, though I stuck to my plans.

The general pattern of traffic growth has proven much as I had read about – slow organic growth coupled with occasional sudden spikes of traffic from popular articles, of which a proportion of visitors are converted into regular readers, so called incrementals. Most of the dips are related to server troubles (my apologies). Spikes are big news articles, or Stumble surges.

Daily page views (hits):

Top traffic sources:

Source/Medium		Visits	Pages/Visit	Time on Site	% New Visits
1.	(direct) / (none)	66,341	4.23	00:05:12	50.71%
2.	animenano.com / referral	30,235	2.98	00:03:41	22.32%
3.	google / organic	24,659	4.74	00:05:19	57.65%
4.	otaku.fm / referral	14,547	3.71	00:04:48	29.95%
5.	dannychoo.com / referral	10,407	5.20	00:06:46	33.08%
6.	cowboycaleb.liquidblade.com / referral	7,402	2.65	00:03:10	67.13%
7.	sweatpig.com / referral	5,681	5.66	00:07:47	47.37%
8.	stumbleupon.com / referral	5,261	2.91	00:02:25	89.96%
9.	yahoo / organic	4,738	4.55	00:04:49	74.59%
10.	google.com / referral	4,571	2.81	00:03:40	22.34%

Direct is the catchall category for identifying people coming here off of bookmarks, feedreaders, directly typed URLs, etc. Anything not yielding a referrer goes here.

I will deal with individual anime related sites below, so they don’t get pushed off by the larger sources you see here.

You can see that the anime related aggregators are used by many to read the site, as well as to discover the site, and have contributed a great deal of traffic.

Thanks must go to Anime Nano for providing what is, overall,  probably the best anime aggregator going at the moment. Otaku.fm (Danny’s aggregator) also contributes much traffic, though the admins at the other large aggregator are frankly quite exasperating in the lack of communication they exhibit. If anyone knows just what phase of the moon I have to sacrifice a goat in to get a response, let alone a listing, from them, please get in contact, as I have tried everything.

For a long time Google was a marginal source of traffic for Sankaku Complex, but lately it has picked up dramatically. The google.com / referral is from people using Google Reader to subscribe to the feeds.

Where these statistics also mislead is in that they include instances where visitors aren’t actually being referred as such, rather they are reading the site using a site as a tool, as in the case of the aggregators. The low pages per visit figure is also an indicator that theses sites are being used to navigate the site, rather than purely as a gateway onto it.

Stumblers actually may make up a higher proportion than here shown, as Analytics has at times completely failed to show enormous volumes of traffic coming in from StumbleUpon and various other sites – as a result we can conclude that Analytics is here deficient and that the overall figures must be somewhat higher.

This is why I intend to switch to web server statistics as my main source of data (also the time lag on Analytics data makes it no good for real-time observation). They almost all come in onto galleries, by the way.

The two non-anime related blogs you see there, Cowboy Caleb (popular Singaporean blogger) and Sweatpig (seems to have gone down; I will admit to not well understanding the site, but my gratitude is unaffected), have contributed a great many visitors through their kind decision to link here, and I thank them for it.

Those blogs I mentioned:

1. Danny Choo: Far and away the largest blog referrer; my gratitude is equally large.

2. StrikeSubs: Kind enough to link here as Sankaku Complex is the best English language resource for news on Pantsu Witches, apparently.

3. a geek by any other name: Gia provides a great deal of timely anime news on her site, and is gracious enough to link here – I appreciate it.

4. Japanator: Links here regularly, thank you kindly.

5. Icarus Comics: A publisher of translated ero-manga. Their sideblog often links here, so I should extend my thanks.

Around the number five spot are also clustered AnimeKon, Kotaku and allied site Ferricorp, so they deserve mentions too.

Another site I should mention is e2046.com, a figure and garage kit shop/community who are kind enough to display Sankaku Complex’s banner prominently… You may be interested to take a look.

A quick and inaccurate run down of the most popular pages over the site’s short history:

1. Living With Monster Girl Series: go and read it if you haven’t already.

2. Girls Preside Over Classmate’s Gang Violation: Sensational.

3. Yukata Gallery: Stumblers love this gallery, and I thank them for it.

4. Soul Calibur IV Underwear Gallery: No comment.

5. Ishikei: Almost a tie with Tony.

As to future developments, one thing I am keen to do is expand the scope and depth of coverage offered; since I have only finite time resources, there are areas and developments I am unable to satisfactorily cover, and making continuous improvements to te site itself is also a pressing need.

With this in mind, I have been planning to look at gathering collaborators in whatever capacities feasible; I had actually intended to wait until reaching an average of five thousand daily visits, but as that number has practically been achieved I may as well extend a solicitation: if you’re interested in participating the success and burgeoning growth of Sankaku Complex, in whatever capacity or on whatever terms, by all means get in touch.

I will launch a more earnest effort on reaching my inexplicably set five thousand mark, not too far off by the looks of things, so you will doubtless hear more then.

Another thing I have been looking at is generating some exposure for allied sites, and more interlinkage; I have a program I’m thinking of testing out, though if you have any better ideas please do make contact.

On a less involved level, you can easily get an account on Sankaku Channel (you needn’t even bother with an email, and in fact you can do most things anonymously) and explore the images and community features there; if you’d like a non-basic account, they’re available but for the asking.

Thank you all for reading, and for visiting!