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There have been some questions about how effective AotW is, i.e. does AotW create additional attention and drive visitors to the featured page? So I looked into the log files and analysed 28 AotW pages over a period of 44 weeks.
The short answer: the average increase in hits is about 600% (median: about 460%.)
Here is a more detailed table. "Weekly hits" means average hits per week (sample size: 44 weeks,) "AotW hits" means number of hits while page is featured as AotW.
| Page | Start date | Weekly hits | AotW hits | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| komi | 2009-01-05 | 122 | 243 | 99% |
| ladder | 2009-01-12 | 154 | 412 | 167% |
| Yi Ch'ang-ho | 2009-01-19 | 102 | 462 | 352% |
| corner shapes | 2009-01-26 | 103 | 587 | 468% |
| shortage of liberties | 2009-02-02 | 41 | 226 | 447% |
| 33 point invasion | 2009-02-09 | 121 | 610 | 405% |
| two stone edge squeeze | 2009-02-16 | 42 | 342 | 718% |
| in a korean baduk school | 2009-02-23 | 43 | 307 | 622% |
| haeng-ma tutorial for beginners | 2009-03-02 | 96 | 692 | 622% |
| Go Seigen | 2009-03-09 | 127 | 557 | 340% |
| basic instinct | 2009-03-16 | 181 | 884 | 389% |
| beginner study section | 2009-03-23 | 582 | 872 | 50% |
| b2 bomber | 2009-03-30 | 103 | 645 | 525% |
| McMahon pairing | 2009-04-13 | 65 | 239 | 265% |
| Joanne Missingham | 2009-04-20 | 53 | 546 | 940% |
| old mottos | 2009-04-27 | 73 | 319 | 337% |
| whole board thinking in joseki | 2009-05-04 | 33 | 407 | 1141% |
| rank world wide comparison / data collection | 2009-05-11 | 62 | 348 | 459% |
| beginner exercises | 2009-05-18 | 269 | 811 | 202% |
| nose tesuji | 2009-05-25 | 25 | 365 | 1390% |
| Rui Naiwei | 2009-06-01 | 70 | 276 | 297% |
| find position page | 2009-06-08 | 36 | 364 | 914% |
| secret art of war | 2009-06-15 | 66 | 441 | 569% |
| tanuki no hara tsuzumi | 2009-06-22 | 25 | 373 | 1416% |
| basic strategies list | 2009-06-29 | 29 | 326 | 1013% |
| double cross cut to connect | 2009-07-06 | 17 | 260 | 1448% |
| Yi Se-tol | 2009-07-13 | 76 | 377 | 395% |
| Benjamin Teuber / guide to become strong | 2009-07-20 | 124 | 921 | 642% |
Obviously, pages that are not so popular have the highest increase (usually from some 20-30 hits to about 350 hits during AotW.) But even popular pages (120+ hits per week) see an increase of about 250%.
During the AotW week, the effect gets less, as one would expect:
| Day of week | Avg. increase | Median increase |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 636% | 447% |
| Tuesday | 768% | 593% |
| Wednesday | 727% | 539% |
| Thursday | 578% | 493% |
| Friday | 534% | 426% |
| Saturday | 464% | 361% |
| Sunday | 455% | 368% |
I hope these numbers are useful. Please note, that there may be some inaccuracies, as only "clean" hits were counted (e.g. not coming from a path, diff, ...) and the AotW week goes from Mon 0:00 - Sun 23:59, while AotW really are posted/removed sometime during the day.
Yeah, that's great! How many hits has the front page on average btw.?
FrontPage has about 7500 hits/week. So on average about 1 out of 15 visitors clicks on the AotW link.
Note that these are just rough estimates, as it does not take into account search engines, people visiting the page twice or more often, etc.