Let's Be Transparent About Our Online Activity
At Corporate Rebels we like to talk about ‘building a movement—and ‘radical transparency’. Perhaps now is a good time to be radically transparent about our performance—and about the movement we have created over three years.
What does this movement look like? How has it grown? Where are the people from? These are questions we answer in this post. The data come from website visits, newsletter subscribers, Slack members and social media followers.
Are you ready for some graphs and numbers?
Website visits
Since our first blog we have tracked website visits in two ways – by WordPress and by Google Analytics. WordPress tracks unique page views. Google Analytics tracks sessions (with multiple page views from the same user as a single session).
This means the technologies track slightly different things, and this makes the metrics different. That’s why we can’t compare them, directly, to each other. That would be comparing apples and oranges. They are complementary, not the same.
Nevertheless, what we see in the graph below is a steady growth in the number of both measures over three years. Whereas only friends and family were reading our blog-post in January 2016, now (three years later) we welcome thousands of readers to each blog. We are definitely not the only people interested in making work more fun!
Both graphs show two major peaks – one around early 2017, the other around the summer of 2018. Both peaks were both caused by posts that have gone ‘viral’.
The first peak was for a post entitled ‘Why the command-and-control mindset is killing your company'.
The second peak due to a post titled ‘How real leaders melt the iceberg of ignorance with humility'.
And steady yearly growth is clear when we look at WordPress’ total unique pageviews for each year (2016-2019):
- 30,405 unique pageviews in 2016
- 262,566 unique pageviews in 2017
- 536,213 unique pageviews in 2018
Where are we all coming from?
But where are all you readers coming from? Google Analytics allows us to identify the geographical location of our readers. When we do that we get this image:
So, where are you all? Well, you seem to come from all over the world; the map is almost entirely covered in blue. Note: the darker the blue, the more dense is the reader base from that particular location.
Here are the 15 countries with the highest visitor densities (with their respective percentages of the total reader base in the brackets):
- United States (17,2%)
- United Kingdom (14,7%)
- The Netherlands (14,5%)
- Germany (6,2%)
- Australia (4,5%)
- Singapore (3,5%)
- Canada (3,1%)
- Spain (2,9%)
- Switzerland (2,8%)
- Sweden (2,5%)
- France (2,4%)
- India (2,3%)
- Belgium (1,8%)
- Italy (1,5%)
- Brazil (1,4%)
Newsletter subscribers & Slack members
Now let’s move from website visits to newsletter subscribers and Slack members. The growth of both groups is steady, as the graph below shows:
Since the start of the website we featured an option for readers to subscribe to our blog, and it has proven attractive. The number of people who have subscribed has just passed the magic figure of 5,000.
We send out a newsletter preview every Thursday and Sunday. The average opening rate of all those emails is ~40% (which compares with an industry average of ~20%); and a click rate of ~10% (with an industry average of ~3%).
In addition to our newsletter, we decided in January 2017, to open our internal Slack community to anyone interested in joining as a way to connect to each other. This community has grown steadily too, recently passing 3,000 members.
Right now we are evaluating the role of our Slack community, as it is not an integrated part of our website. And that is something we would like. So, we might change this in the future to add a more ‘community feel’ to our current website. More on that later.
Social Media followers
Last but not least – our social media followers. From the start we shared all kinds of stuff on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. In early 2017, we added Instagram.
Twitter and especially LinkedIn have grown steadily from the start; the latter growing rapidly over the last two years as the graph above shows.
Facebook growth, however, has been rather slow recently. We are not yet sure what to do about that in the future. We might kill it altogether, in favor of Instagram.
What's next?
Currently we are working hard on a new version of our website. We would love to hear your feedback and ideas. Feel free to share your tips, suggestions and ideas in the comment section below!
But, for now, this note offers transparency, and information, about our online activity.
