I was looking at some web page data this morning and I think I may have given a false impression in my post “You Never Really Know…” back in early November.

In that post I gave a list of web pages on this site in rank order of popularity based on user numbers. But that list really doesn’t tell the whole story. When I said that the pages “The Universal Preamp” and the “12AU7 ‘Color’ Preamp” were very popular, I don’t think it really came across how surprised I really was by lack of traffic for the “Source Selection Preamp” page. I also got some feedback about some of the relative popularity of the power amps. So I thought I give a little clearer idea of about what I was saying with respect to web page popularity.

I have a graphic which I review on a regular basis that shows the traffic for each web page over any time interval I want. It shows traffic to each page in terms of both the number of unique users accessing the page and the number of unique page views of that particular page. There is a lot of information which can be teased out of this single graphic.

So I went back and took a look at the site traffic from the day I posted the Source Selection Preamp project page to yesterday. Then I annotated that plot showing all the most popular pages. Here is that annotated plot.

Moving from the lower left, going right means increasing page views (i.e. how many times the page has been loaded) and going up means increasing numbers of unique users.

Now this particular instance of this plot is fairly typical. By far the two pages with the most traffic (both in terms of users and views) are the two preamp pages shown in the upper right. This pattern has been true for quite a while. As for the amplifier pages, the “Marblewood” always kind of stands alone. It’s clearly more popular than the other power amplifiers, but not nearly to the level of the two simple preamps. This is good as far as I’m concerned because I view the Marblewood as an ideal first power amplifier for someone new to amp building. So the fact that it gets more traffic than the other power amps is a good thing (in my view).

In the center of the plot is a small groping with all of what I would consider to be the meat of the projects I’ve posted. The relative positions of these five amplifiers drift around in time but the grouping remains mostly the same. To say that any of these power amplifiers is “more popular” is not really correct. For any given time window, any one of the five could be the most popular in either users or views.

Then I arrive at the surprise; the Source Selection Preamp. This plot contains all the data since the project page was posted. When I was working on this project I was thinking that it was going to be very popular because it answered so many of the comments I had received on the other two preamps. I am gratified that it is more popular than the collection of “other” pages in the lower left, but I had expected it to be more up and right. Perhaps in the neighborhood of the Marblewood amp. I continue to find this result interesting and a little mystifying. But as I said before, it’s really more of a curiosity than anything else.

I only posted this data to help clarify what I said back in November. And to let people see that web page popularity is actually a little more complicated than it first appears.

As always, questions and comments are welcome.

And Happy New Year to everyone.