The biggest fall was before the new site launched, what's your point?

Revelation's point is that the site popularity has fallen dramatically since the relaunch and who can fail to agree with him? Looking at that graph the site fell about 2000 places in popularity in the ten months prior to the relaunch, another 1000 in the two months since it.
I hope that the changes that are slowly being introduced halt the decline but that graph suggests that the site, perhaps even our hobby, was losing popularity anyway.
I certainly do not think that the relaunch was well handled, particularly the lack of pre-launch testing.
But perhaps you do ?

Mick Bajcar

dendrobatid wrote:

but that graph suggests that the site, perhaps even our hobby, was losing popularity anyway.

A HS mentioned this a few weeks ago as well, that apparently our 'rival' sites also lose popularity. (probably caused by the rise of social media).
Would be interesting to see how our competitors fare in these graphs.

Of course it's not good to see this decline for A.net, but I'm hoping that we will get some visitors back as we keep updating the site. In addition, there are some things in the pipeline that might make us a bit more popular again.

Mick, I agree that the launch was not handled well,

Regarding JP, they made a huge leap that almost seem erroneous last autumn where they gained 25K in the ranks, and this year they have fallen 6000.
PP has lost 100K in the same time, but they are a small player.

airkas1 wrote:

Of course it's not good to see this decline for A.net, but I'm hoping that we will get some visitors back as we keep updating the site. In addition, there are some things in the pipeline that might make us a bit more popular again.

I hope the site does improve.

dendrobatid wrote:

Revelation's point is that the site popularity has fallen dramatically since the relaunch and who can fail to agree with him? Looking at that graph the site fell about 2000 places in popularity in the ten months prior to the relaunch, another 1000 in the two months since it.
I hope that the changes that are slowly being introduced halt the decline but that graph suggests that the site, perhaps even our hobby, was losing popularity anyway.

I doubt interest in the hobby itself is changing significantly, but it could be that people's willingness to visit hobby-specific web sites like this one is going down with time.

JohnKrist wrote:

The biggest fall was before the new site launched, what's your point?

I wasn't trying to make a point about the new site vs old, just about the general trend line.

It's good the owners invested in the site but it's sad that the investment didn't change the trend line for the better.

Revelation, I'll listen to Yazz-The only way is up and hope it won't get much lower

John
Perhaps Gary Moore, 'Still got the Blues for you' might be more apt.

But at last the Blues are back

Or you could try Mr Blue Sky by E.L.O

And of course Lady Antebellums 747 to get the Queen back

Alexa ranks show a trend, a trend that less Alexa users are visiting Airliners. So if Grandmas recipy site has more alexa users it will rank higher, even if it only has 1000 daily visitors. How many here have the Alexa addon installed?
And there is no IOS or Android add-on, which is strange since 60-65% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. So the graph above really shows that more and more are moving to mobile instead of desktop. What else I find when checking websites is that most websites are showing a decline in alexa, where the internet motor porn seems to be the golden exception. So when Paul says our number of daily visitors are pretty constant, I trust that more than any add-on driven metric tool.

-

John I don't mean to sound rude but you are coming across as naive, ridiculous and almost desperate. The view numbers on the photos have tanked by an enormous amount so it would suggest that a lot less people are looking at this web site. I admire the way you defend this site but let's get real. Regards.

johnr wrote:

John I don't mean to sound rude but you are coming across as naive, ridiculous and almost desperate. The view numbers on the photos have tanked by an enormous amount so it would suggest that a lot less people are looking at this web site. I admire the way you defend this site but let's get real. Regards.

Don't get me wrong, I know photo views are down and have been declining a long while. And the huge top5 images didn't really help as that hurt the view counter as well. And the new site layout made a few leave as well I just mean that the likes of Alexa are not a trustworthy source anymore, and their stats basically show a decline in overall internet usage globally, when it's actually the other way around. More and more people are getting access to the web, and Asia stands for almost 50%.
What we can see are unique IP's from visitors, Alexa user or not, and that's more accurate. Have we lost viewers? Yes, But we haven't lost 30%/300K unique monthly visitors as the alexa rank suggests, that's all I'm saying.

I've pretty much quit a.net. Use to be a First Class member and paid money to be one. Just now checked it out after a lapse of couple months. A.net is still NOT USER FRIENDLY. Don't like it very much.

Yeah, this place is dead. I only come back every 1-2 weeks out of morbid curiosity. You go to CivilAv, and it says newest reply 2 hours ago on the latest thread. Unthinkable on the old a.net! Top aviation news (MH 370 etc.) are only picked up on the new a.net forum several days later, if at all.

Forum is still unreadable and unusable. The avalanche of ads remains an insult.

Well, we have discussed this to death. A.net had a good run, and it was a unique site in its day.I used to check in 10x a day, but now I cannot even bring myself to look at what it has become.

Time to move on.

JohnKrist wrote:

Alexa ranks show a trend, a trend that less Alexa users are visiting Airliners. So if Grandmas recipy site has more alexa users it will rank higher, even if it only has 1000 daily visitors. How many here have the Alexa addon installed?
And there is no IOS or Android add-on, which is strange since 60-65% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. So the graph above really shows that more and more are moving to mobile instead of desktop. What else I find when checking websites is that most websites are showing a decline in alexa, where the internet motor porn seems to be the golden exception. So when Paul says our number of daily visitors are pretty constant, I trust that more than any add-on driven metric tool.

I appreciate the effort to try to educate us on what Alexa does and doesn't say.

While I go along with much of what you say, for it to all be true there'd have to be a bias for people who mostly look at porn on PCs to also install the Alexa plug-in, and I'm not sure we can make that leap.

What Alexa itself says ( http://www.alexa.com/about ) is:

Alexa's traffic estimates are based on data from our global traffic panel, which is a sample of millions of Internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions. In addition, we gather much of our traffic data from direct sources in the form of sites that have chosen to install the Alexa script on their site and certify their metrics. However, site owners can always choose to keep their certified metrics private.

Our global traffic rank is a measure of how a website is doing relative to all other sites on the web over the past 3 months. The rank is calculated using a proprietary methodology that combines a site's estimated average of daily unique visitors and its estimated number of pageviews over the past 3 months. We provide a similar country-specific ranking, which is a measurement of how a website ranks in a particular country relative to other sites over the past month.

There's a lot of different ways to make the outcome we now have.

Most optimistic: a new set of porn fans all decided to install the Alexis plug-ins and/or porn servers decided to run the Alexis scripts in a short period of time and that has skewed the data

Most pessimistic: the traditional alexis users who used to visit a.net have now decided to visit other web sites.

The 'constant number of unique IPs over time' metric has it pitfalls too.

The IP's tell that the number of visitors is constant, that matters more than it's relative popularity against other sites. If 9.000 Pokemon Go interest sites gain higher popularity than Airliners.net, does that mean Airliners.net is less popular among aviation enthusiasts than before?

JohnKrist wrote:

The IP's tell that the number of visitors is constant, that matters more than it's relative popularity against other sites. If 9.000 Pokemon Go interest sites gain higher popularity than Airliners.net, does that mean Airliners.net is less popular among aviation enthusiasts than before?

There are a lot of pitfalls with using unique IPs in the era where NAT and proxies mask the origin IPs a lot.

Also how you gather the metric can skew the results a lot too. For instance in reply 16 we read that a person who used to visit 10 times a day is now only visiting once per week or two, so one could gather the metric in a way that detects this (unique IPs per day) or does not (unique IPs per month).

I agree with Reply 16, CivAv has been suffering tremendously since the site update, regardless of what Alexis and/or unique IP counts say.

I think new posts per day might reveal more, along with posts read per day.

PlaneInsomniac wrote:

Forum is still unreadable and unusable. The avalanche of ads remains an insult.

I think the forum is readable once you install an ad blocker, which is what everyone should do anyway, but the internet advertising industry is doing a lot to undo the benefits of ad blockers, see recent Firefox 'upgrades' for examples of this.

I think the botched new site transition chased away a lot of the forum users and it doesn't look like they're coming back too quickly if at all.

PlaneInsomniac wrote:

You go to CivilAv, and it says newest reply 2 hours ago on the latest thread. Unthinkable on the old a.net!

That one's a bug that still hasn't been fixed: it always says '2 hours ago' even if the post was just made.

Scorpio wrote:

PlaneInsomniac wrote:

You go to CivilAv, and it says newest reply 2 hours ago on the latest thread. Unthinkable on the old a.net!

That one's a bug that still hasn't been fixed: it always says '2 hours ago' even if the post was just made.

click your profile icon upper right corner, user control panel, board preferences, choose my timezone and 2 hours ago is history...

regards,

drstrangelove

I guess I posted what follows in the wrong way and for that I apologize. I am sorry. I was not aware that there was already a thread on this subject. I do not regularly read any of the forums. Until the recent site change I rarely even looked at them and had never posted to them. My interest in this site, and the only reason I was a paid member, has always been in viewing and downloading pictures of historic aircraft. Fifteen years ago, when the internet was still new to me, I did participate in a few forums on bird watching and french literature but I am a slow typist, poor speller and bad writer and my interest in participating quickly waned.

And honestly, my memory is getting so bad I could have read something last week and have forgotten where I saw it when I wrote yesterdays post .

Getting old stinks!

So here it is, hopefully in the correct place:

Save the pictures you like to your hard drive??

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/airliners.net

In just 7 days a.net's global ranking has fallen 119 places (from 9092 on 08/07/2016 to 9211 on 08/17/2016). If you look at the graph on alexa.com you'll see that this is not an anomaly! It is part of a dramatic trend since the "new" site was introduced. I've been watching these stats for a few weeks now and pretty much every bad statistic is up and every good statistic is down. I have some contacts and I want to verify my information a bit better but this is starting to look like one of the most dramatic down turns in the history of the internet.

Which.......if you love airplanes and a.net (or at least the old site) like I do is very depressing.

What does this mean? It could very well mean that a.net, and all these wonderful and historically important images, might not be here that much longer. Sound crazy? Google "geocities" or "microsoft groups" or even look up the history of yahoo. All of these were at one time really busy, big time and important places on the world wide web. They are now either gone completely or only a shadow of their one time selves.

And this might not be the worst news!!

It also looks like long time photo contributors are pulling their collections off the site. I am personally aware of two excellent photographers, Bob Garrard and Richard Silagi who's collections I can no longer find on a.net. The end of Bob's collection is a real loss for the site. He took the time to scan his amazing collection of photos he took in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Historically his collection was almost priceless and considering the period's equipment and cost the quality was superb.

Fortunately, I finished downloading all of Bob's pictures just a few weeks before the site change (which was when his photos disappeared). I had Richard's pictures on my list to download but sadly I had not got to them.

If there are photos on a.net you like (or love), you may want to follow my example and download them now. "Management" of this "community", whoever they may be, seem to be not only unresponsive but actually openly hostile to anyone who suggests that the "new" site was not a very good idea and that many (perhaps most?) of us would like the old site back. Considering the site stats that is not an auspicious attitude.

And if things are so bad that photographers are leaving.........

.........well, I'm really glad I have Bob's wonderful pictures safely on my hard drive. It's slow and time consuming but I am going to try and grab a few more while they are still available. I've spent $1000s on aviation books, I guess I can afford the time?

a long time "paying" (first class) member, John DuBois

drstrangelove wrote:

Scorpio wrote:

PlaneInsomniac wrote:

You go to CivilAv, and it says newest reply 2 hours ago on the latest thread. Unthinkable on the old a.net!

That one's a bug that still hasn't been fixed: it always says '2 hours ago' even if the post was just made.

click your profile icon upper right corner, user control panel, board preferences, choose my timezone and 2 hours ago is history...

regards,

drstrangelove

I am sorry, with all due respect, but your answer confirms rather than contradicts my point.

We still do not even have mouse hover airport/airline code tooltips, which seriously should be no more half an afternoon of work for a semi-talented coder. It took these guys several weeks to change the background color of this standard forum, which really shows how bad the situation is. And let's not even get started about the dozens of other missing features, bugs, and forum limitations that make the new a.net so much worse than the old one.

I have given up hope. The way the Internet works, DM has a very short window of a few weeks until a.net is completely forgotten. Frankly, even if they fixed everything by tomorrow, it would likely be too late. And at the speed they are going, I don't see them fixing 10% of the biggest problems by year end.

In my many years in retail and sales it was always stressed that it was hard to keep a customer and easy to lose one AND once you lost one it was nearly impossible to get them back.

This old saying is probably even more true online where there are literally unlimited choices.

It's really sad but I can not help having a growing feeling that the old a.net so many of us loved is doomed.

drstrangelove wrote:

Scorpio wrote:

PlaneInsomniac wrote:

You go to CivilAv, and it says newest reply 2 hours ago on the latest thread. Unthinkable on the old a.net!

That one's a bug that still hasn't been fixed: it always says '2 hours ago' even if the post was just made.

click your profile icon upper right corner, user control panel, board preferences, choose my timezone and 2 hours ago is history...

regards,

drstrangelove

Does it make "last year" magically disappear, too?

No?

Pity.

JohnKrist wrote:

Regarding JP, they made a huge leap that almost seem erroneous last autumn where they gained 25K in the ranks, and this year they have fallen 6000.

They was bought by FR24 and became a sole supplier of it's thumbnails, that's why. They take Planespotters place at FR24 and latter lost views dramatically because of this.

kulverstukas wrote:

JohnKrist wrote:

Regarding JP, they made a huge leap that almost seem erroneous last autumn where they gained 25K in the ranks, and this year they have fallen 6000.

They was bought by FR24 and became a sole supplier of it's thumbnails, that's why. They take Planespotters place at FR24 and latter lost views dramatically because of this.

Right, forgot that, thanks