Do we have any data on active users in PMSE?

Question

I am intrigued as to how populated the PMSE community is.

I very rarely ever meet anyone in my industry in the UK who has heard of PMSE and even less contribute to the community.

Do we have an annual State Of survey showing active / passive users or other such metric?

Part of me wonders how widely answered questions are read across the industry. There may be some data from Stack Overflow which is applicable.

Something like

• 99% Google searchers
• 1% viewers
• 000.1% contributors

Something like that...

Answer 1

At 5000 reputation, you gain access to the site analytics pages (see the help center docs, or the site analytics page). This doesn't answer all of your questions, but it does show metrics on posts (questions, answers), votes (accept, up, down), and traffic (page views, visits, new visits), along with referring sites, search engines, and direct traffic.

Some of the information you were asking about:

• 91% of our traffic comes from searches. 7% is referrals. Only 2% is direct.
• Of the referring sites, most are Stack Exchange sites. Academia, Politics, Electronics, Puzzling, Software Engineering, and Workplace are all listed. Some of these make sense for cross-linking, but this also includes where people were when they clicked on a Hot Network Question.
• Google is the most popular search engine, by far.

I'd have to pull the CSVs into Excel to do some more analysis, but it looks like we've been average around a dozen answers and half a dozen questions since we entered public beta on February 14, 2011.

It looks like somewhere around 5-6k page views has been our weekly trend as well.

The number of new visitors has been tapering off since a peak in mid-September.

Answer 2

Worth to mention there's also data.stackexchange where we can have some insights on the actual user activity.

Crossing creation date with last visit, we can see that there's a steady group of users that, regardless of the year they created their account, they keep visiting the community. Unfortunately, our user retention seems to be pretty low (between 10% and 20% of users that created an account have visited the community the subsequent years). Not sure how low it is as I haven't run the same analysis on other communities, though.

Data is there to play as much as we want.