State of the 'Pound - February Update

A few months back, I checked in with what is quickly becoming an annual tradition of mine: the State of the 'Pound article. Coming out of that post, I received tremendous feedback from the community that you all were interested in getting regular updates on how the blog is performing relative to other sites in the SB Network. Because I am a sucker for just about anything that is politely asked of me ... and because the numbers look good ... I'm happy to share with you the latest updates hot off the press for the month of February.

Overall, February was a month of tremendous growth for 'Pound as we continued our streak of being the fastest growing Huskies fan blog on the Internet and the fastest growing amongst other Pac 12 SBN sites. Below is a chart highlighting some of stats compared to February 2013.

For purposes of managing the site, we tend to focus on three critical statistics: Total Pageviews, Total Visits, and Total Unique Visits (not double counting repeat customers). While the 'Pound has a long way to go to catch the overall traffic levels of sites like Bruins Nation, one can't help but to note the radical growth that we continue to experience across all of the three critical statistical measures. I'm particularly proud of the growth in monthly unique visitors (I've ranked the chart based on % growth of uniques) as this stat speaks to the effectiveness of our community in attracting new visitors. If you look at pageviews numbers, you'll see that we are now a clear number 3 amongst the P12 blogs - and indication that our content is driving new eyeballs and adding to our rich community.

We also track some raw stats that you might be interested in seeing related to the overall productivity of the site. These stats include things like posts per day, comments, Facebook likes, Tweets, etc. Here are the stats for the SBN Pac 12 sites:

There are a couple of interesting things to note in these stats. First of all, the UWDP community is very active. Only two sites - Cal's and Oregon's - posted more comments than you guys did in the month of February. I'm also impressed with the number of overall pageviews relative to the number of articles posted. We averaged nearly 5500 views per article. That's second to only Bruins Nation and is a tremendous number when compared against the national network.

Of course there are things we can improve upon. I'd love to see our FanPosts become a bigger part of our community and, to that end, I renew my commitment to bump quality FanPosts into the main headline areas. Also, we are not performing well at all when it comes to maximizing our Facebook exposure. Getting our articles better tied to our Facebook site and making it more shareable is a critical tactic that we need to execute to enrich our community.

Finally, I have our top 10 report for the month - these are the top articles for the month of February based on overall pageviews that you, the members, voted on with your eyeballs.

1. National Signing Day Open Thread (Landon)
2. Naijiel Hale Commits to Washington; Baker Next? (Knibbe)
3. Washington Suspends Stringfellow and Myles (Knibbe)
4. Budda Baker Commits to Washington (DeGrasse)
5. Spring Previews - Quarterback (DeGrasse)
6. Two Huskies Involved in Super Bowl Altercation (Cassino)
7. 2/3 Recruiting Rumors Open Thread (Landon)
8. 2015 Football Recruiting - An Early Look (DeGrasse)
9. Spring Preview Updated Scholarship Chart (Landon)
10. Assessing Washington's 2014 Recruiting Class (DeGrasse)

I'd like to invite each of you to continue to provide us feedback and, if you are interested, to volunteer your talents. As I've said before, we are all just a collection of fans looking to create a virtual sports bar community where we can hang out and talk college sports. It's a labor of love and we want to do the best that we can by all of you.