Cop Galleries: Internet Viewing Observations

These are results of a totally unscientific study of internet viewing of my Bike Cop Rodeo Galleries.

I announced these galleries first on the hotboots.com "Boots on Line" board on October 12. I am fairly well-recognized on that board as a regular participant, so lots of people read my posts, regardless if they reply to them.

During the one-week period from that announcement until October 19, my statistical analysis software indicates that about 4,400 different computers were used to follow the links from that post to my website. I can not say that 4,400 individuals were counted, as I think that some people used a computer at home and a computer at work (or elsewhere) which counts as separate "visitors" where the visitor may be the same person.

Of the visitors generated from links on the BOL board, 80% of these visitors looked at both sub-galleries (one gallery is of the boots and one is of the cops). Those looking at the subgalleries often viewed most or all of the individual photos by clicking on each one which results in a larger image than that shown on the thumbnail image in the gallery. These views totalled over 20,000 in a week. Not bad... lots and lots of interest.

One does not have to register to view the Boots on Line board, so there is no way for me to know how many people actually read my posting there but did not follow the link to my website. However, I think a large number of readers of my post actually did. Larry (webmaster of hotboots.com) makes it very easy for people to follow links posted with a message.

Interestingly and in comparison, I posted a message about these galleries on the "abootfetish2" Yahoo Group, which has been around for a long time, and shows about 1,545 members. Not all of these members are active nor all receive or read messages sent via that group. Yahoo group list maintenance is a devil of a task, and I don't blame Jared, the site owner, for not deleting members who have bouncing email addresses.

Nonetheless, the posting of a link on the "abootfetish2" Yahoo Group resulted in about 300 visits from different computers in the same one-week comparison period. That is just a drop in the bucket compared with users of the "Boots on Line" board. Further, only about 25% of those visitors actually clicked on a link to either of the two subgalleries of boots or cops. Most visitors generated from the ABF2 group just viewed the entry page which explained the event and showed one image for boots and one image for cops. Then left... that is, they surfed on somewhere else.

I cannot explain nor would try to guess why the population of viewers of this gallery who came from a link from the "Boots on Line" board viewed the subgalleries and most if not all of the photos that I painstakingly cropped, edited, and posted -- compared with visitors from the ABF2 group who did not. Perhaps it is because the BOL Board is truly web-specific, meaning that you're already on-line viewing a page on a website, and it is easy to click on a link and view what's there. With the ABF2 (or any Yahoo Group), most viewers come from a link embedded within an email message. They may click on the link, but then return to their primary task of reading their email and responding to messages. Their "purpose" for using the computer then-and-there is related to email, not web surfing.

I have no other ideas as to why the viewership from the BOL Board is so much higher than from the ABF2 Yahoo Group. Participants in both internet activities are definitely guys into boots (and cops, and leather, etc.)

Your thoughts?