31March
The headlines
size accounts 12617062 225451 1.82% size accounts_active_1 512663 -64495 -11.17% size accounts_active_30 1813853 -44767 -2.41% size accounts_active_7 1146034 -33619 -2.85% userinfo total 12601298 225949 1.83% userinfo updated 8039937 98199 1.24% userinfo updated_last1 204383 -18908 -8.47% userinfo updated_last30 1053800 -30536 -2.82% userinfo updated_last7 616959 -20996 -3.29%
The trend of 1.8% growth per month continues, but the active:30 figure falls by 2.4%, and that's roughly consistent with Mark Kraft's proposition of a 1.8% decline in active:30 per year.
For those reading this without seeing a previous entry, we treat userinfo:updated as a proxy for all human users.
Sex
gender F 3460861 66003 1.94% gender M 1685913 36546 2.22% gender U 2068783 38247 1.88%
Total gender declared: 7215557 (+140796, 1.99%) (57% of Accounts, 90% of Updated - the latter is up 1%.) Males are still signing up faster than females, this is the sixth month in a row we've observed this fact. It's looking inevitable that the F/M ratio will decline below 2 around the end of the year - it's currently at 2.053.
Age
Here's a list of the ages with at least 100,000 people, now with changes:
age 15 193537 -819 -0.42% age 16 362392 -2941 -0.81% age 17 503736 6502 1.31% age 18 574345 13428 2.39% age 19 585401 17107 3.01% age 20 547479 16937 3.19% age 21 494318 16927 3.55% age 22 410620 18456 4.71% age 23 328390 14303 4.55% age 24 271465 11651 4.48% age 25 218257 10742 5.18% age 26 197960 6771 3.54% age 27 161985 11521 7.66% age 28 116141 6669 6.09%
Modal age remains 19. Quartiles come at 18.5 (nc), 21.2 (+0.1), 25.3 (+0.1), consistent with the usual aging process. Total declaring an age: 5940904 (+203599, 3.55%) (82% of Sex, 74% of Updated.)
Top 20 Countries
US 3340945 25599 0.77% RU 454872 14881 3.27% CA 283708 2908 1.02% UK 244439 3030 1.24% AU 115935 1645 1.42% UA 53508 1919 3.59% PH 45217 767 1.70% SG 42579 1648 3.87% DE 42235 750 1.78% FI 33718 565 1.68% JP 27980 450 1.61% NL 23377 266 1.14% BY 17673 803 4.54% IL 17581 333 1.89% NZ 16826 250 1.49% BR 15968 285 1.78% ES 15930 299 1.88% FR 15265 297 1.95% SE 11303 188 1.66% IE 10727 167 1.56%
224 other countries: 253,865
Total countries declared: 5077935 (+51334, 1.02%) (85% of those declaring an Age (-3%), 70% of Sex (-1%), 63% of Active).
Belarus moves past Israel for position 13, and that should be the last climb until the end of the year - on these trends, the Netherlands may be out of the top 12 by December. Singapore moves past Germany for position 8, and may challenge the Philippines by the summer. The usual suspects show the fast growth, but slower than recent months - Belarus 4.54%, Singapore 3.87%, Ukraine 3.59%, Russia 3.27%. Eleven of the top 20 record growth no faster than Livejournal as a whole; increases in the Anglosphere and Netherlands are particularly slow. India is 135 users behind Ireland, closing the gap by 16; Italy passed 10,000 this month, and is 541 adrift of Ireland.
Signups
For our purposes, the March signup month runs from 27 February to 29 March. Data from 29 February is discarded, and does not count to daily or monthly totals.
The trend this month is about 1900 fewer signups this year than last. Only one day this year exceeded the corresponding day last.
Total signups: 2002 - 29,548 2003 - 52,681 2004 - 314,430 2005 - 348,187 2006 - 286,736 2007 - 226,950
Syndicated feeds
Top 10 Blogthings 33094 -258 Postsecret 25767 724 Word of the Day 16817 21 Officialgaiman 15819 98 Astronomy Picture 11216 109 Penny Arcade 9219 95 Sinfest 8821 99 XKCD 8300 NEW VG Cats 8278 -5 Overheardnyc 8178 83 Readership of feed ranked: 50 1408 (+38) 100 678 (+20) 200 317 (+8) 500 130 (+7) 1000 59 (+3)
The Zipf distribution allows us to approximate n = (1/k^s)*a
where n = number of readers
k = rank
s = exponent (experimentally, 1.15)
a = scalar multiple (experimentally, 133,700)
This gives a similar shape to last month's distribution, where s=1.14 and a=126,200.
We might extend the table:
2500 16 (nc) 5000 7 (nc) 10000 3 (nc) 25000 1 (nc) 50000 0 (-1)
We're reasonably confident that slightly fewer than 50,000 have at least one reader.
These are the statistics. Conclusions, as ever, are yours.
Commentary this month
In News this month, Denise Paolucci spun the line that recent changes to Livejournal's on-site posting page were improvements. She claims to have hard data, but refuses to share it with the public. Mrs. Paolucci refuses to provide a method to test her thesis, and we must therefore discard it as faith-based piffle.
The correct thing to do, of course, is to keep both old and new pages available. This requires minimal configuration and near-zero ongoing maintenance.
Mrs. Paolucci also refused to apologise for an advertised feature being unavailable. Since January, Livejournal's posts by phone have been accessible only to those able to call a +1-800 number; for no good technical reason, access has been restricted to customers between the St. Lawrence and Grande.
We don't have time to mess with what [isn't] broke[n], said the ubiquitous Denise P. Rather raises the question of why Six Apart tinkered with the site's payment method, reducing the number of top-100 sites that are not themselves adverts and do not accept adverts to just one.
Nuke all Livejournal commercials - requires Greasemonkey.
The shilling desk reports a change that will allow advertisers to track who sees their commercials. This really is a complete abdication of Livejournal's previous position, saying that it wanted to do something different. Making it far worse is the attitude of Abraham Hassan, responding to criticism of the concept behind this sell-out with one word. Tough. We'll take that as your resignation note, Mr. H.
Clearly, the only safe option is to disable images entirely for the complete Livejournal site, manually loading each and every picture. Welcome to Web MCMXCIII.
Each Six Apart employee primarily working on Livejournal has a brief blurb on the staff page. Joy Taylor has the impossible task of selling advertising for an ad-free site, and she says, You can't do today's job with yesterday's methods and be in business tomorrow. Then why ... oh, you get the drift.
