CVN Weekly Statistics

2001 through 2002

jdb_educator

Managing Editor

CVN

11/17/02

It has been said that you can prove anything with statistics. That can be done by what statistics are provided and how the are presented. Enron and other companies have shown us all how that is done.

Governments around the world do it by reporting on education statistics. Regular people do it by cheating on tests or lying about the results. So do businesses and any organization you can think to suggest. Most report honestly the results they have. All try to "spin" or present the results in a positive way. "Spin" is an acceptable practice. Lying, cheating, or hiding results is not.

The demand for "accountability" or proof you are getting results is a fact of life. Since CVN Weekly is a citizen owned, operated and run Cybertown business, we have decided our readers have the fun and the right to see how we are doing. CVN Weekly services are free, there is no charge for our publication. Lol, It would be fun to total up the "payroll" of our Cybertown CVN staff, but that will have to await our hiring of an accountancy firm that is free!

Cvn presents some statistics for yur exploration. Webmasters and many who have even free sites have available to them information on the number of hits and unique visitors who visit their websites.

A "hit" is the number of times pages in the site are viewed. even if the click is an accident, wrong page etc. It is recorded. Unique visitors are different computers/people that click on the site, regardless of the number of pages viewed.

CVN Weekly Chart recording page hits and unique visitors for 2001

This chart provides the recorded numbers since CVN weekly moved to 50megs.com and Purchased space to present the news to Cybertown citizens as staff began to work towards making the Weekly news appear each week. At this point we have published 100 issues in four years. That breaks down to 25 issues per year. Since September of 2001, we have published 58 issues on time or with only a 1-3 day lag time. As you can see the numbers continued to rise through 2001. No data is available for earlier issues, although longtime CVN staff may remember being exciting when a counter recorded a total of 500 hits over about one or two months.

CVN Unique Visitors for 2001

This bar graph shows the increase by month of the number of individuals or computers that visited CVN Weekly. According to 50 megs.com, this is how that data is collected:

CVN Weekly Chart recording page hits and unique visitors for 2002

The chart above shows the numbers recorded by the software used at 50megs.com to report to our weekly publication.

January and June stand out because of unusual events. January we began the breaking news url and program to deliver vital news to Cybertown on weekends. The lead story was seeking recommendations for Hawk to get a title. It was a lot of fun. The June effort saw the Weekly become a functioning Daily as Cybertown went offline for a longer amount of time than ever before. This also led to the creation of a number of groups at Yahoo! And likely other locations, as people tried to keep informed. Also during this time, we made some advertising efforts to insure that people knew we existed.

Now the graphs change dropping a 0. As you can see from the numbers chart in June we had 1243 unique visitors while the graph shows apparently a lower number. The information is now being reported visually in groups of 10 so that progress and loss of CVN readership show clearly. Just add a 0 to the numbers posted at the right side and that will clear up any confusion.

This graph reports in the same way showing unique visitiors and reporting in groups of ten. Add a 0 to get close to the actual numbers. The information is now being reported visually in groups of 10 so that progress and loss of CVN readership show clearly. Just add a 0 to the numbers posted at the right side and that will clear up any confusion.

Conclusion

Now a good report will conclude with the spin and highlights while gently pointing out any downsides, and suggestions are usually presented to "solve" any problems. At CVN we can see that people are indeed reading what we write. That is exciting for new writers and section leaders as well as our veteran reporters and managers. We had nearly 10, 000 hits in one month (June) more than the 8855 page hits we had in 2001. Our unique viewers show that we have a number of regular readers per month exceeding 400, and many people who come to look at back issues at different times, recognizing and effectively using our archive system, and resource sections of CVN Weekly. We are continuing to meet the demands of our stated mission. We are indeed serving Cybertown and providing useful content, fun, opportunities and important information to the citizens of our city. What remains to be done is to increase readership, involve more people and provide continually better and more timely content for citizens. Much of that will need to be done on the Daily News side of our organization. Time, talent and writers available limit what we can accomplish. After all we are a volunteer group of people having our fun by serving the city. The establishment of news sections has allowed the weekly to add to content, look at new ideas, interview people, provide everyone access to information and provide job opportunities outside of the political structure and governing possibilities of Cybertown.

Suggestions for Improvement

CVN Weekly has identified the following areas for improvement and focus needing of course, more volunteer labor:

Advertising: CVN needs to keep letting new citizens know we are here and reminding citizens how to find and read us.

Organization: The Daily News team needs to expand and add solid, dependable quality writers. It is the official News of the city.

The weekly should continue to add new sections, try out new ideas, new opportunities and add proven section chiefs as deputies.

The structure of the weekly is sound, but too many issue sections are lost as people quit managing or running sections. Zip files need to be gathered and stored. Old issues need to be fixed and updated. Possibility of reorganizing the organizational structure and the site structure of the weekly need to be looked at carefully. The downside of individually hosted sections is lost news, that once was of interest to readers.

Additional ways to have fun within Cybertown need to be explored. Multiple meetings and times for them need to be developed, considered and tried. All should be focused on providing fun as well as important, useful participation in the game we call CVN.