It make sense that why theymos was talking about the YouTube channel

[mdayonliner]

I was playing with alexa ranking and thought to see the stats for BitcoinTalk. This is what I found.



Notice the graph is for last one year. The pick was from February - March and since then the graph started to drop. Till date it is standing on the lowest for the entire year.

It's obvious that the site started to get it's peak when bitcoin price was having it's ATH. However dropping the traffic could have two possible reasons.

1. The bitcoin price started to drop so visitors started to lose interest on bitcoinTalk

I doubt it though.

2. The new merit system introduced on Jan 24th.

I will kinda back this up.

Personally, I do not mind to kick out 100 (i.e) spammers to have 1 good forum member. If the traffic drop is for the 2nd reason then we should not worry about it.

Now, about the youTube channel - since theymos said...

...this might be a good way of attracting good new users...

If we check the traffic which are coming from social media then we will see the percentage is only 4.66% and YouTube is leading with 46.93%


In summary I think we need to improve the forum experience instead of worrying about forum traffic.

Thoughts?

PS: I was worried though when I spotted the alexa graph before having any deep thoughts.

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[examplens]

If you compare this Alexa graph with bitcoin price or any old altcoin price, you can see a very similar graph like this from Alexa rank.
When we had the biggest point of price, then we also have most interested people for cryptocurrencies. a lot of money are attracted to a lot of people, among others and hunters(Forum spammers members) who want to get bitcoin/money. I think only my father is not asked me about bitcoin at that time. btw he is 80yrs. old and have brain stroke.
I'm pretty sure that in case of sudden and high growth of market values, we'll have a wave again of "newcomers" who will seek a chance to take some btc.

[Don Pedro Dinero]

That drop in traffic was also a drop in shitposters, although so many of them remained that we didn’t even notice.

We have to decide, although it is up to theymos, if we want to make more emphasis on traffic or on quality. I’m quite positive decent traffic with good posting quality can be achieved but even if there weren’t paid signatures, bringing a lot of traffic to the forum would inevitably come with spam.

I think we just need to keep making small changes towards quality to reach a forum where there is decent traffic and also quality.

[Findingnemo]

If you compare this Alexa graph with bitcoin price or any old altcoin price, you can see a very similar graph like this from Alexa rank.
When we had the biggest point of price, then we also have most interested people for cryptocurrencies. a lot of money are attracted to a lot of people, among others and hunters(Forum spammers members) who want to get bitcoin/money. I think only my father is not asked me about bitcoin at that time. btw he is 80yrs. old and have brain stroke.
I'm pretty sure that in case of sudden and high growth of market values, we'll have a wave again of "newcomers" who will seek a chance to take some btc.

But even the people who heard about bitcoin may not heard about bitcointalk.org and I too met a bitcoin trader from LBC who doesn't aware of BTT so we need to expose our BTT then it can make our community to grow bigger and stronger,Yes the spammers are also the reason for the traffic drop because of the merit system but in future we will have real kind of crypto discussion other than completing the signature quotas.

[DdmrDdmr]

Aside from the sways in market and hype, and their influence on the number of visitor, I often wonder how the SEM/SEO is being treated. One of the areas of potential growth (hopefully a healthy one) is the local boards. There are some local boards that have way more potential, just comparing the number of posts to the population.
Sure, there are many other factors that play their role (regulations, IP block, per capita income, etc.), but it does seem that at some point, perhaps SEM/SEO might be adjusted/boosted to give Bitcointalk more visibility in certain areas.

[hugeblack]

That drop in traffic was also a drop in shitposters, although so many of them remained that we didn’t even notice.

+ account sellers: Before the establishment of the merit system, there were a lot of people who create thousands of accounts for selling, and the main reason is the month of this forum as a means of quick profit and thus buy accounts.
Some people have managed more than 300 accounts. will add the source when I remember it.

I think this is the same reason for having a lot of visits from YouTube although I was surprised by the ratio.

[Flying Hellfish]

If we check the traffic which are coming from social media then we will see the percentage is only 4.66% and YouTube is leading with 46.93%

YouTube is leading the way because of all the bounty hunter and ICO announcement videos which both have links to BTCT threads.

I don't really think the YouTube channel idea was meant to increase overall traffic to the forum but instead to increase good new traffic to the forum.

[Joel_Jantsen]

Interesting information dude..

YouTube is leading the way because of all the bounty hunter and ICO announcement videos which both have links to BTCT threads.

Exactly! Every bounty has more than 1000+ YouTube video bounty participants with their profile links to bitcointalk in the video description. If you consider the number of bounties that run here, the visitor number is quite high.

[doolittle]

Aside from the sways in market and hype, and their influence on the number of visitor, I often wonder how the SEM/SEO is being treated. One of the areas of potential growth (hopefully a healthy one) is the local boards. There are some local boards that have way more potential, just comparing the number of posts to the population.
Sure, there are many other factors that play their role (regulations, IP block, per capita income, etc.), but it does seem that at some point, perhaps SEM/SEO might be adjusted/boosted to give Bitcointalk more visibility in certain areas.

I really like your idea of local councils. I believe that if you combine local councils and YouTube channels in your native language, you may increase the number of people interested in this forum. However, this will attract new users, which is not recommended by the new rules.
I agree with the opinion that ICO companies advertise through YouTube and a lot of such bounty hunters.
I think the traffic on the forum has decreased due to the drop in bitcoin price. I also spent the earlier analogy, why queries in Google fell because the graph of Google trend shows a decline in the popularity of people.

[mdayonliner]

Interesting information dude..

Thanks mate.

YouTube is leading the way..

The leading 46.93% is out of 4.66% (only) of the social source. Then we have Facebook (17.30%), twitter (15.23%) etc. 4.66% is not much compared to the other metrics especially the percentage from search engine.

38.71% is huge and all of them are organic!



Have a look on the top 5 keywords...



Notice "bitcointalk" itself is leading with 6.33% out of 38.71% meaning most of the times the known people are searching for the site. May be we need to start improving with SEO to get organic traffic. Focus on keywords which have "bitcoin" in it.

Unfortunately when I search the word "Bitcoin" I end up seeing bitcoin[dot]com is the 2nd organic result then wiki, coindesk etc. First one is bitcoin.org



Let's see a summary of the traffic sources (desktop only)...



35% direct, search engine is leading with 38.71%(the top keyword is "bitcointalk" itself). What I think of is...
1. Improve forum experience (Good news is theymos already started the move)
2. Focus on search engine (since we do not have money problem we can experiment paid advertising(?))

I often wonder how the SEM/SEO is being treated.

I hope this post of mine will give a better insight?

[Jet Cash]

I can do a little bit to help by adding Bitcoin Talk banners to some of my domains.

I can also add some selected thread links to a few of the help sites. That can add some link juice to the forum. Adding cooments to my image hosting site would also contribute a fairly small bit to the forum ranking.

Don't forget the cross linking possibilities in Fit to Talk. You can help Bitcoin Talk as well as improving your prospects of getting a few merits.

[JetAid]

We can all help Bitcoin Talk to maintain its popularity by adding links on our own sites. It's a very small  guesture of thanks to the forum.

[Welsh]

It kind of makes sense. I'm just concerned about the content that gets published there, and whether it would be considered boring, and then the project is just abandoned because it didn't work out. The thing is I've seen some useful content get suggested, but honestly we need exciting content which is going to draw new users in, and not necessarily help those that are part of the community at the moment. It's definitely something that we can do, but it just depends on the angle theymos is taking, and what his motives are. If its to drive more traffic then the content needs to be exciting, and I think a news outlet would be the better option, and then showing unique discussion of this news on the forum.

Probably just need a public thread for posting quality content to showcase. You wouldn't need to hire people to research for you as I'm sure the community as a whole will be more than willing to help.

[mdayonliner]

It's definitely something that we can do, but it just depends on the angle theymos is taking, and what his motives are. If its to drive more traffic then the content needs to be exciting, and I think a news outlet would be the better option, and then showing unique discussion of this news on the forum.

I think we already have tons of contents which are really useful. It will take days to bring out (list) even some of them. However, we need better arrangement of the contents IMO so that, newcomers get everything in one place without getting bored or lost. We also need to give them enough education about forum environment once they join.

Marketing is a must to attract outside users. Marketing could be instant one (pay per click) or long term (SEO with targeted Keywords) to get organic traffic. Look at the Bitcoin Cash guys - they are spending way too much money (email marketing, hosting events, paid search engine advertising¹ etc) to market their shitty altcoin.

¹Not sure if this is a paid ad on google. Keyword: "bitcoin"



@: Jet Cash and...

We can all help Bitcoin Talk to maintain its popularity by adding links on our own sites. It's a very small  guesture of thanks to the forum.

We can but I am not sure how it will help. What you are talking about is - creating backlinks. What I understand is - you need high PR sites. In that case, most of the sites out there we personally have - do not have higher PR than BitcoinTalk which means it will not help BitcoinTalk as much as it will help them personally. I certainly am sure that if I backlink my personal blog with bitcointalk then my blog will get more benefit than bitcoinTalk since my blog does not have that much high PR than bitcoinTalk.

If someone has high PR website then this will help a bit though.

[Jet Cash]

I understand that there is a difference between inbound links and reciprocal links. I believe that "backlinks" are links back to a referring site, and Google tends to deprecate them. A link to Bitcoin Talk in a comment on my Q&A site without a link from BT is unlikely to help the Q&A site, but it can add a drop of "link juice" to Bitcoin Talk.

btw - Google has moved on from simple Page Ranking, and they are using some more sophisticated methods of evaluation.

[mdayonliner]

btw - Google has moved on from simple Page Ranking, and they are using some more sophisticated methods of evaluation.

I am not very updated about their SEO algorithms, they really change things very often. There was a time when I had good understanding about SEO and stuffs but I realized that I am now old school LOL. I guess my information about backlinks was outdated.

[theymos]

I don't care about traffic much; I just want there to be a good forum. (In fact, maybe lower traffic would currently be more helpful for that, on the whole.) I don't do any collection/analysis of traffic stats beyond the public stats. That traffic bump is very clearly due to the hype from/driving that massive bubble, though, and it's happened many times before.

I think that a lot of people stumble onto bitcointalk.org, but many of them (perhaps on average the best among them, who have the most "better things to do") don't bother to register and participate. The YouTube idea was motivated in large part by the idea that you'd be targeting people smart/thoughtful enough to watch a smart/thoughtful video, and then they'd get engaged enough by the video that they'd go to the trouble of registering and participating on the forum. I want good, long-term users, not anything that would even show up in a traffic graph.

I don't think that advertising would generally be helpful, and the forum has never advertised. In the vast majority of cases, the only ads that would work would be things that would offer immediate gratification, and those would tend to attract the wrong sorts of people. Maybe some very-highly-targeted ads could be constructive, but it's not something that I'm going to think about anytime soon.

I've done a bit of work toward SEO optimization of the forum over the years, though a lot more could be done. Lately it's been a bit more in my mind, mostly because it annoys me that those clone sites sometimes appear above bitcointalk.org in search results. That really shouldn't happen.

[mazdafunsun]

1. The bitcoin price started to drop so visitors started to lose interest on bitcoinTalk

I doubt it though.

I think that it is obvious , the crypto hype was to blame and is directly correlated. And the merit system could not have had any real impact on the traffic back then since ,as we all know, the spammers had the option to make new accounts and still particapte in sign. campaigns.

I think that there is a real possibilty that we will see some changes in traffic regards the last merit system adjustment.

If we check the traffic which are coming from social media then we will see the percentage is only 4.66% and YouTube is leading with 46.93%

Allmost all social media traffic is because of bounty hunters so it is not much of criteria.

In my mind the traffic that counts is the organic one, which comes from people actually searching for stuff mostly relavent to blockchain.

[Jet Cash]

I'll think about this. I was thinking about opening up Fit to Talk to non Bitcoin Talk members, and maybe this could be beneficial to the forum. I discourage bounty hunting, and I am primarily interested in the use of crypto-currencies in disadvantaged countries. Of course most of the populations in these countries do not have English as their first language. However, many of them are intelligent and crypto aware, perhaps they could become useful members.

[pugman]

The YouTube idea was motivated in large part by the idea that you'd be targeting people smart/thoughtful enough to watch a smart/thoughtful video, and then they'd get engaged enough by the video that they'd go to the trouble of registering and participating on the forum. I want good, long-term users, not anything that would even show up in a traffic graph.

Yeah no, it doesn't work like that anymore. Most, if not all crypto nerds have been to this forum,and have left it for obvious reasons. You don't have to start a darn youtube channel, but just clean up the forum to massive extents. Hire more mods, or do something that will actually reduce spam.