Club Jade’s stats take a leap in 2011

2011 was a good year for here at Club Jade. We saw hits rise, in no small part due to links from StarWars.com and Reddit, and people searching for news about the Blu-rays and Hallmart ornaments. Plus that whole thing about civility. And Vin Diesel. (Yes, Vin Diesel.) Head below the cut for the details.

We’ve seen a big jump in hits from 2010 – up 39%. We had 319,666 visits and 460,025 pageviews, giving us a daily average of 875 visits and 1260 pageviews.

A lot of credit for all this does go to that one humongous spike we had in August, courtesy of Reddit. An August 4 link to a 2009 post featuring Vin Diesel talking about playing D&D made it to the front page of the social news site, propelling the post to a yearly total of 52,603 pageviews and 50,580 uniques. With something around 46,000 of those hits being in a single day, it killed our bandwidth several times… Which is part of the reason I’m not replacing the now-dead video on the post! Generally I have no beef with Reddit – we’ve gotten some occasional traffic from the Star Wars subsection over the years – but if we had to get Slashdotted, I just wish it had actually been something Star Wars. Oh well. I did see a daily average jump after that, so apparently some folks stayed.

Making it to the top more organically was a relic from the early days of CJ, our chatroom-generated list of Jedi pick up lines. Search engines drove it to a yearly total of 6,605 pageviews and 6,326 uniques: “Star wars pick up lines” was the top search engine keyword of the year.

We also saw some fairly steady traffic from StarWars.com. Early in the year from our participation in their 2010 roundup post, and later due to the fan site page, which was part of the September relaunch.

Our most popular pages remain, as always, the book release schedule (18,629 / 12,226) and the fan fiction archive (5,213 / 3,368.)

As for our 2011 posts, here’s the top ten. These seem much more news-driven than last year – lots of people searching for info on the Blu-rays and Hallmark.

1. Our top 10 Star Wars books of 2010. (3,299 / 3,121; Stooge, James, Paula, Erika, Dunc) Yes, technically this was posted in 2010, but the very last day of 2010, so I’m counting it. This is the post was linked directly from StarWars.com in their 2010 roundup. (Which, alas, did not survive the redesign.)
2. A call for civility in Star Wars fandom. (2,451 / 2,188; Dunc) Railing against the ‘true fan’ mentality. Glad to see this got some traction: I’d hate to think I went all ‘I’d like to buy the fandom a Coke’ for nothing.
3. Ready for Hallmark’s 2011 Star Wars ornaments? (2,101 / 1,658 ) and Bossk, Golden Snitch among Hallmark’s 2011 Keepsake Ornament Premiere offerings (1,701 / 1,451.) Yes, I’m counting these together… The Hallmark posts are always popular, but this is the first year they broke into the top ten.
4. Star Wars Blu-ray report: Cropping, sound, extras and… The Holiday Special? (1,452 / 1,393, Dunc) Links to some of the first reports on the Blu-rays.
5. Video: Harrison Ford settles a feud. (1,331 / 1,228, Dunc) Ford tells off Chewbacca in this video from Jimmy Kimmel. Cowboys & Aliens may not have been a gigantic success, but we’ll always have the line “Daniel Craig is my Wookiee bitch now!”
6. Yes, there is a Star Wars porn parody. (1,144 / 1,070, Dunc) Rule of the internet: Porn always rises. Sadly.
7. Canon, continuity, and the Expanded Universe. (1,141 / 968, Dunc) A follow up to the civility post.
8. Club Jade Craft-athlon. (1,137 / 1,058, James) Technically, this is a page, but it laid out the rules for our contest and got around pretty well.
9. Lucasfilm confirms ROTJ Blu-ray change. (1,095 / 956; Dunc) AKA, the ‘NOOOOOOOOO!’
10. Book of Sith coming in 2012. (1,038 / 914; James) We broke this news out of SDCC.

The list of top referring sites has a couple obvious additions and some reshuffling, but no real surprises: Reddit is first, followed by Facebook, Twitter, Wookieepedia, Google, StarWars.com, TFN, EU Cantina and a whole gaggle of individual Livejournals. (The total number of LJ referrals puts it right between the Wook and Google. Pretty good for a ‘dying’ site.)

All these figures are generated by Google Analytics, which I’ve been using to track CJ since 2005. If you have any questions, go right ahead. (Just don’t make me do any more math.)