A couple of weeks ago the KenyaForum subscribed to a real-time data tracking system so that we could more thoroughly analyse the web traffic visiting our site. Ordinary web statistics tend to give a confusing picture, since they measure ‘all’ internet traffic including the countless machine bots from search engines, emails, hackers and spammers etc. What we wanted to find out was “who, where, what and when” real people were visiting the site.

The system has its limitations, or rather our budget does, so we are only able to either see whats happening at an instant, or over the last hour or so when the cache overflows and has to be reset. Nevertheless by watching the screen and manually monitoring we are able to tell you a few things about yourselves.

Number One:

Sunday morning today 9.45am: viewers are down 50% (against average over the last 14days) in Nairobi… We guess you are all at Church?

Number Two:

Most of our viewers are from Kenya, predominantly Nairobi, next comes the USA, UK, Norway, Tanzania, Uganda, Canada, Taiwan, India, Germany, France, Iceland.

Number Three:

In Nairobi, nearly 50% of you use mobile phones to access the KenyaForum. Most use Opera 10.5 mobile to view the site on your mobiles, followed by Safari 3.0+ which is the Apple Mac platform (iPad and iPhone). We have seen surprisingly few Android OS users but now that Samsung have decided to go this route we are expecting to see more in the future.

Number Four:

Peak times for users during the weekdays are 9am, midday and 5pm. At 9am there is a sharp swing away from mobile users to static hardware, are you naughty viewers using your office PCs to surf the web?

Number Five:

Over the last two weeks your most consistently viewed pages have been on our series of articles covering Operation Linda Nchi, the biggest peak however was on Monday and Tuesday this week with the coverage of the ICC verdicts. So thanks to our 16,000 visitors this month.