Statistics: New Users Per Day
One of the assertions I see a lot in dissatisfied news and other official community posts (and sometimes might even have made) is when things get dissatisfactory, people will move to GreatestJournal. Since both LJ and GJ give us the statistics on new users per day, I thought I'd test that hypothesis out.
The stats for LJ can be found here and the stats for GJ can be found here. It's hard to figure out trendlines from a list of numbers, so here are some graphs (click to access full):
The black lines are two week average trendlines.
Here are the graphs combined for comparison's sake.
Both sites are declining in the number of new accounts in comparison to previous times--my guess is to a saturation of the blog market. You can also see the drop/spike in new accounts for LJ/GJ around the day of the announcement of the Six Apart takeover -- 01/05. ((Edit: Actually, looking at the data again, I think it's just the LJ Blackout of 2005.))
However, new accounts were on the upswing on LJ at the beginning of this year. So what happened?
Well, the Sponsored+ account level was announced in lj_biz on 03-08. It was implemented/introduced on a wide scale in news on 04-18. The first announcement was around the time new account creation started to drop off. GJ hasn't had an all out spike in new accounts recently, despite everyone mentioning it as an alternative if LJ gets too unbearable, but the new account signups do show a slight increase since Sponsored+ implementation.
Of course, that raises an interesting question--since the new account level wouldn't have been apparent to new users fresh to the LJ sign up page at that point, are most new accounts created by existing members for other purposes, and the drop off a sign of unwillingness to commit further to LJ? What do you think is the explanation for these phenomena?
The stats for LJ can be found here and the stats for GJ can be found here. It's hard to figure out trendlines from a list of numbers, so here are some graphs (click to access full):
The black lines are two week average trendlines.
Here are the graphs combined for comparison's sake.
Both sites are declining in the number of new accounts in comparison to previous times--my guess is to a saturation of the blog market. You can also see the drop/spike in new accounts for LJ/GJ around the day of the announcement of the Six Apart takeover -- 01/05. ((Edit: Actually, looking at the data again, I think it's just the LJ Blackout of 2005.))
However, new accounts were on the upswing on LJ at the beginning of this year. So what happened?
Well, the Sponsored+ account level was announced in lj_biz on 03-08. It was implemented/introduced on a wide scale in news on 04-18. The first announcement was around the time new account creation started to drop off. GJ hasn't had an all out spike in new accounts recently, despite everyone mentioning it as an alternative if LJ gets too unbearable, but the new account signups do show a slight increase since Sponsored+ implementation.
Of course, that raises an interesting question--since the new account level wouldn't have been apparent to new users fresh to the LJ sign up page at that point, are most new accounts created by existing members for other purposes, and the drop off a sign of unwillingness to commit further to LJ? What do you think is the explanation for these phenomena?