I was perusing through our statistics this morning while waiting for a CD to finish burning, when I noticed something strange. Really strange. RedMonk, as we’ve mentioned before, typically does something in the neighborhood of 300K pageviews a month now. Our stratospheric growth (you don’t want to know where we started from 😉 stalled just a bit over the summer months, picking up single rather than double digit thousands of new impressions per month, but the growth was still there. We’re pretty happy with the way things have been going.
What all of the above means is that, on any given day, redmonk.com is liable to be hit about ten thousand times. This includes visitors to our blogs, visitors to our site, and, of course, spammers of both the comment and referrer variety (notably, it omits those picking up our feeds from Feedburner, where the vast majority of our readers are directed). But when I looked at the September numbers, they were up. Improbably up. In fact, as of the last week or two we’re doing more traffic in three days than we previously could have anticipated in a month. Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation, we’re in line for something like 1.8M visitors this month.
Sounds good, right? Huge spike in interest? Not exactly. Certain channels directing folks to RedMonk have indeed picked up, possibly as summer comes to an end and folks return from vacation, with the most noticable example of this being Google. But the primary target of all of this new attention seems not to be our blogs, or our homepage, but our wiki. Now to be clear, I like our wiki, and think it does have some good content: our COA, howto’s for reading and writing blogs, etc. But do I think it’s reasonable to expect that it would receive nearly a million hits in about two weeks? Not so much.
Throw in the fact that the most popular individual page on the wiki seems to be my Bloglines howto, registering in at 1238 impressions as of this moment, and it seems pretty clear that something is up. Something, most likely, of a spamming nature. Unfortunately, the stats package supplied by 1and1 is not sufficiently fine grained to determine the source of this new traffic, nor do I have Statcounter installed on the wiki (yet).
So at this point it’s nothing more than a curious anomaly, and not one that’s costing us money (yet). But before things get worse, I’m wondering if any of you have any particular stats package that you can recommend – preferably one that’s free – so that I can figure out just who likes our wiki to the tune of a million hits a month.
