Happy Birthday Tyner Blain Readers

beer second glass

Hooray Us

We’re taking the day off to tip back a couple cold ones and celebrate a great year as a community! Tip a glass or two with us, and thanks for being here! Technically, we’re cheating – we don’t turn two for two more days. But here we are just the same.

Tyner Blain History

Tyner Blain was formed in May 2005, and we started the blog on Nov 24th 2005. New to the whole blogging thing, we started out with a free site on WordPress, realized that we had an opportunity to create a great community, and moved everything to our own domain in January 2006. We changed providers once since then, although we were able to do it without affecting any of our URLs or our readers.

Since then, weâ€™ve published over 600 articles, covering topics throughout the software development life cycle, with a common theme – delivering software product success. We hope youâ€™ve enjoyed them, and thanks to all who have contributed to the fantastic conversations that have started in the comments on many of the posts. Weâ€™re not going anywhere, and hope you arenâ€™t either.

Your Favorite Posts

Last year, we crunched the numbers to find the top ten posts. In February of this year, we updated our site software to track which articles have been read the most. You can see the Top Twenty at any time (click to the left, or in the menu bar at the top of every page).

Here’s the top ten from that list (traffic since Feb 17*):

Thanks to everyone who has read, commented on, contributed to, inspired, linked to, criticised, or otherwise been involved in everything we do here. You canâ€™t imagine how appreciated it has been, is, and will continue to be. Thank you!

* The visit numbers are low, because we started tracking so lately. When we look at our full stats, for example, the innovation post had over four times as many visits.

It’s All About You

I had a great discussion with a reader and fellow blogger offline a couple weeks ago. He wanted to know why we publish full articles in the RSS feed – wouldn’t that reduce traffic to the site, he wondered?

Maybe. Probably not. But it definitely increases traffic for the ideas – and that’s the half the point. We get less discussion on articles when people read through their feed readers, but we get more people reading.

Where Are You From?

When we look at the numbers, half of you came from links on other blogs (thanks!), a third of you came from search engines, and the remaining sixth of readers typed in the URLs directly. Yahoo and Google have provided about 75% of the search traffic, and the largest provider of traffic from links has been Pragmatic Marketing (with about a 3% share). Thanks to y’all too!

You’ve come from 179 different countries, according to Google Analytics – here are a couple slices of the numbers:

By Country

54.9% United States
6.1% Canada
6.0% United Kingdom
4.6% India
2.8% Australia
2.1% Germany
1.4% Philippines
1.2% Spain
1.2% Netherlands
1.2% Malaysia
1.0% Singapore
1.0% France

The remaining countries are under 1% of traffic, with only one visitor from Liechtenstein – we need to work on our marketing there. 91% of you read the site in English.

How do You Visit?

On average, you spend 2 minutes and 30 seconds on each visit to the site, looking at 2.5 different pages in a visit. Almost 60% of all visitors look at one page and then leave the site – so the people who stick around are staying longer and looking at more pages. Just over 2% of you have been to the site more than 100 times. Just under 1% of the visits involved looking at 20 or more pages. 16 people visited the site more than once, but with over a one year gap between visits. I’m guessing the second return was accidental, or else they are really busy.

And you visit a lot. You’ve viewed over 100,000 pages per month all year, and we’re sustaining a long term steady growth in subscribers as well as visitors. No “hockey stick” traffic for us – although we were growing much faster in traffic per day when we still published five articles a week, our growth in subscribers has been unaffected. Hopefully this pace is easier for you – it sure is for me!

Thanks

This is a good day for giving thanks, so thanks. Any of our “original readers” still around? You qualify if you were one of the handful of people who were reading in 2005. Shout out and say howdy – here or offline. And have a great one, and stick around!

Scott Sehlhorst is a product management and strategy consultant with over 30 years of experience in engineering, software development, and business. Scott founded Tyner Blain in 2005 to focus on helping companies, teams, and product managers build better products. Follow him on LinkedIn, and connect to see how Scott can help your organization.