Tech site readership slumps precipitously

ONE OF THE first things I do when I get up in the morning, late for life or not, I check my e-mail and a few key web sites. Outside of the usual tech and news sites, I tend to look at Alexa, to see how the site is doing for the day. If you type in a site name, without the www, it will give you a list of a few of the sites vital stats. If you hit the "See Traffic Details" button, it will give you more, including a graph.

The daily numbers tend to lag by a day or two, so Monday and Tuesday will usually reflect the weekend. The jagged peaks on most sites' graphs are indicative of higher weekday traffic, and lower weekend traffic. It is a fairly low rent, free and public version of what Webtrends gives you.

For the past few months, I have been looking at our site, here, and since the beginning of February, have noticed an alarming drop in the ranking, we dropped from a weekly average in the low 3000s to the low 4000s in a month. The three month average also showed a similar drop.

I was quite confused. The site was doing about what it always did, and the numbers seemed to indicate that since Christmas, we were losing readers faster than liberal newspapers at a Republican fundraiser. Something was going on.

Then I looked at several other tech sites that I read daily. They almost all showed the same trend, down a little in January, and hugely down in February. Even mighty Slashdot dropped precipitously. The higher up in rankings you go, the harder it is to drop, but there was something going on. Has Alexa changed its rankings, 1000 sites suddenly become more popular, or simply cosmic radiation?

The question came down to is it us, or the Unternet? From the small sample of a dozen or so sites I looked at, it was a tech-site wide phenomenon, so it wasn't just us. The final piece of the puzzle came in when we got the latest site numbers in, and they were down. That means if the Alexa numbers are indeed right for us, they probably are correct for The Register, Anand and others.

So, the question remains, why is tech site readership in the toilet? Since the beginning of the year, there has been a ton of news, some breaking stories, and general fin and mayhem in the silicon world. This should be a net plus, but it is a net loss. Does anyone have an answer? Drop us a line if you have a clue, at the moment, we are simply scratching our heads. We just know that it is happening. µ

* OUR own Tony Dennis reckons that one reason may be that large corporations are tightening up on the Web sites employees are allowed to view, following the continuing rash of security scares.