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The State of AAR: August 2009

While many people were on vacation during August, it was a busy month for AAR staff and readers. We’re proud of what’s happening at AAR and wanted to share some of it with you in a once-a-month report. This is the first of those reports.

A lot of new content was added to AAR in August. As always, our primary focus is reviews, and we posted 50 new reviews – including seven DIKs – in August. In addition to the reviews, we added a variety of other new content, including 20 new posts here at the AAR News and Commentary Blog, and 22 at AAR After Hours.

Both AAR’s own statistics, and those available at Alexa, confirm that visits to AAR have increased steadily over the course of 2009. At the end of August, AAR’s traffic rank at Alexa was 97,264, a very good number indeed (anything under 100,000 is something to be proud of), and up 76 percent according to Alexa’s figures.

It’s hard to get a handle on exactly what Alexa’s traffic rank means in terms of actual visitors. For that, we can rely on the statistics provided by AAR’s Web host. During August, there were 506,572 visits to AAR by 127,805 unique visitors. This is a 76 percent increase in monthly visits since January of 2009. During their visits, readers visited an average of five different pages at AAR.

We’re very proud of all of the interactive features at AAR, and it’s clear AAR’s readers enjoy them as well. The reader forums were busy during August, with 164 new threads generating 1,579 reader comments. But the comments only tell a portion of the story. A lot of us lurk on the forums, while others of us comment once on a thread, and then check back periodically to see what others have written. This activity is substantially larger than the number of comments, as is evidenced by the number of views of most threads. For example, a thread on Recent Books Read and Rated – Aug/Sep 2009 had 81 comments through the end of August, but over 5,600 views. The Suggestions for Next AAR Book Club thread had 44 comments, but 1,737 views. Rest assured, whether many people comment or not, people are reading what you write on the forums, in massive numbers.

We strive to be the best romance reader Web site on the Internet and we have you all to thank for our continued success. See you back here next month.

– LinnieGayl Kimmel

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