Hey guys!

A little quiet around here lately, I've noticed!

I was curious to see if any of you had checked your site statistics and noticed a drop (or flurry!) of activity in the summertime? If you've experienced a decline, have you used any creative endeavors to draw your users back in?

i wonder if the effects of seasons would be based on demographic...

for instance, a site that targets teens might have more traffic in the summer, when school's out (I know that's when we have the more warez-kiddies problems, but that's kinda different, huh?)

Kate Sloan
Customer Care/Account Management
Infopop Corporation
Moderator: Community Management Forum

"Barn's burnt down, now I can see the moon." - Masahide

...and we use it as the prime time for upgrades and changes to the site that could be disruptive.

We also hype the heck out of the upgrades to keep everyone interested.

Tom

Phog.net: Where the Jayhawks Hold Court!

Mine is more based on announcements related to Star Wars movies and merchandise, since both of my sites are Star Wars fan sites. I do have a little fluctuation due to the seasons, you see it with folks who are high school or college students and their computer access mainly comes from school.

Doug
Moderator: Community Management
Captain Kirk: "Once again we've saved civilization as we know it."
Dr. McCoy: "And the good news is they're not going to prosecute."

We typically experience a drop when the news cycle is slow, Congress is out of session...etc.

So it isn't necessarily seasonal where CG is concerned. This summer has been very slow compared to last summer when we had our highest level of traffic due to the breaking Chandra Levy - Condit story.

Since we're a political rumor mill, our traffic fluctuates with the news cycle. Bigger stories, scandals produce more scoop and more gossip mongering and discussion along with new users outside of our loyal base.

Capitol Grilling - The Political Parlor Game
http://www.capitolgrilling.com

So it really it seems that the seasonal affects on community aren't the weather based kind -- more the cycle of the board's topic/theme than anything.. sounds right?

I once served as the administrative director of what was at the time one of the oldest freenets in the country. For those of you not familiar with freenets, they were text based dial-up bulletin boards geared towards serving local areas. They provided free or low cost discussion boards and very basic e-mail service. This was all before the explosion of the web and the multi-media that came with it.

Our service had a very large community and offered discussion boards covering a very wide range of informational and entertainment topics.

During the time I served as AD, Iwent back through the records and charted the activity over several years. While I no longert have the figures, as I recall there was a marked difference in activity as the seasons changed.

Overall, there was a thirty percent decrease in access during the months of July and August when compared to our peak months of January and February. There were some boards on the system that bucked that trend, such as those devoted to summer sports, but they couldn't compensate for the loss of activity on the vast majority of the other boards.

Another component that I looked at was the total humber of new posts. That thirty percent dofference in access translated to about a forty five percent difference in posting.

We also experienced about a twenty five percent difference in e-mail activity.

Through surveys and and other forms of feedback, we determined that the reasons for this change included:

An increase in activities outside the home during the summer months.

Students, teachers, and workers that only had computer access through school and work which they did not have during vacation periods.

More personal and face to face activities during the summer months.

Summer jobs that demanded more of their time.

Additional discretionary funds due to lower utility bills, summer jobs, etc., that allowed them to spend more time going out to dinner, the movies, theme parks, etc.

These figures are from several years ago and things have changed a lot since then, but I suspect that many of these factors are still valid.