More "international appeal"

A couple of days ago, following PZ's lead, I looked at my Sitemeter readings to see what proportion of my audience comes from outside the U.S. What I didn't realize at the time is that SiteMeter only tracks your last 100 visits while calculating this. Depending upon one's traffic, this can lead to potentially wild swings in the percentages, considering that half the world is asleep at any given time and the percentage coming from each part of the globe may vary a lot depending upon what time of the day it is there. The version I originally posted was from around 2 AM EST. (As you recall, I was putting the finishing touches on a grant.) However, the reading is much different at different times. For instance, here is around 7:30 AM EST yesterday:



There, now. How's that for a broader international appeal? Also, suddenly my U.K. readership is much higher, which makes sense because it's around 12:30 PM there.

What I'd really like to see is a much larger sampling, to get a truer version of what the real percentages are that doesn't depend so much on the time of day, but I guess I don't care about it enough to pay SiteMeter for its SiteMeter Plus package.

Comments

  1. Oh, in my post on the topic I went into details why the curve of %-foreign should be U-shaped.

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  2. One point, some of us don't tell the real country - I prefer to have websitesreact to me as if I was English-speaking, and not Danish, so my settings are usually set to UK or US. My browser might actually currently be set to Danish settings, but it is not a given.

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