1 Million Page Views | What are they doing?

Blue Dot has just hit the 1 Million page view per month mark. I thought it would be interesting to share where Blue Dot users are spending their time. I particularly want to thank the avid fans and friends of Blue Dot, that have been contributing so many interesting and useful web sites to the Blue Dot database over the past year. First of all, the total time spent on Blue Dot is pretty amazing. We believe people spend 1.5 minutes on each page on average, so we're getting over 25,000 hours of user attention per month. If people value their time at $10/hour, they're investing over $3M per year just in using Blue Dot. Since a large portion of our traffic is coming from search engines (about 75%), the "average user" is not someone who is a regular user, creating their own dots. Rather, they are browsing and reading the dots created by our regular user base. When we created Blue Dot Buzz, we thought the majority of search traffic would be directed there. That's not at all what's happening. Most search traffic is landing on the individual profile pages of our users. In fact, over 60% of our total page views are spent looking in user profiles. Of those, 10% of time people are looking at a top level user profile, with the remaining page views split evenly between viewing a profile restricted to an individual tag (e.g. http://bluedot.us/users/mike/tag/travel), and individual Dot "permalink" pages (e.g. 144 Places I've Slept in the World). Surprisingly, less than 5% of our traffic is to our "Front Page" summary of today's dots. But about 10% of our page views go to "Buzz" pages where people are finding the most recently popular Dots about a particular category (e.g., http://bluedot.us/buzz/movies).