Some Usage Statistics

Since I know some people here enjoy stats. Here are some fun site usage stats!

Neither of us are fascinated by web analytics. The only parts of analytics we care about are device/browser stats (e.g. how many people are using chrome vs firefox, and what devices they’re using to access the site), response times, and error rates. But we both hardly ever (maybe a couple times a year) view stats showing the number of visitors. Well, newrelic sends us a weekly email containing that, but since it only captures website users and not app users, it’s not super valuable.

Anyway! A better (or at least, more interesting) metric is map edits/submissions. How many machines were added/removed, etc. Given that we started working on this app back in 200…8? the following stats only cover a smidge of the life of the project. The start dates represent when we added functionality to track this information.

Locations submitted (since 2015-10-17): 2,809

A small percentage of this number can be attributed to an iOS “bug” wherein if people smash the Submit button then we receive their submission multiple times. We’d say 3% at most can be attributed to that bug (which will be fixed very soon!).

Machines removed (since 2015-10-17): 11,130

Machines added (since 2017-03-06): 4,166

Different start date than machines removed : To extend this rate to the same start date as the “machines removed” date, very basic math can show us that if 4,166 machines additions occurred in the past 146 days, then 18,604 may have occurred in the past 652 days (e.g. to 10/17/2015). But that’s not really accurate, given that we’re regularly adding new regions, thereby increasing the opportunities to add machines to places.

High Scores (since 2017-03-06): 420

We wiped all the high scores from the site when we implemented the user system on March 6. This is a little-used feature, but hey! That’s ok.

Machine comments (since 2017-03-06): 3,278

Location metadata (since 2017-03-06): 1,555

Metadata refers to user-editable location info, such as Location Type, Website, Phone #, and Operator. I know that’s technically not “metadata,” but… shut up.

Contact Us messages (since 2015-10-17): 407

Confirm Location (since 2017-03-06): 2,283

And we have about 2,000 user accounts (since March 6). That number is obviously a better representation of how many people are editing maps, and not how many people use them.

We hope you find these super basic stats interesting. We certainly did! More interesting would be something like, “rates of usage, holding ‘number of map regions’ constant” in order to see how usage has evolved over time.