Recently in Traffic Category

A bit of information regarding the site outage that affected Flightglobal on Friday - Saturday last week.

An incident hit our central systems around 3.40pm GMT on Friday and took much of Reed Business Information's IT infrastructure down (RBI is the publishing house for Flightglobal). Even our email was down and we were forced to resort to Tweeting messages regarding the problems in order to communicate with the Flightglobal community.

The Infrastructure team worked through Friday night into Saturday morning to get everything back up, and the site returned to normal at around 10am GMT on Saturday. Which is pretty good going considering how many websites, networks and systems they had to get back up and running.

We do have redundancy in the system designed to keep the main parts of the site up during an incident such as this but such was the severity of the problems that those rerouting processes themselves were affected.

You can see the impact the outage had on Flightglobal from the traffic graph below (hourly page views), with traffic virtually drying up instantly, and not coming back properly till Saturday morning.

The good news is that this is about as bad a scenario as you can image for a website publisher, but we recovered pretty rapidly and have learnt many lessons from what up until now had been a theoretical situation.

Whether it's a Farnborough or Paris year, the major show of the year sets the benchmark for Flightglobal as it does for the rest of the aerospace industry.

This year saw online activity build to a frenzied high during the month of June.

The Air France tragedy, Sir Richard Branson as Guest Editor, and the wealth of Paris Air Show coverage all contributed to build on Flightglobal previously record audience and traffic totals to reach unprecedented levels.

The month's overview looks like this: Nearly 1,000,000 individuals (one million) visited the site looking at over seven million different pages on this website.

We also saw Flightglobal overtake Boeing in the Alexa rankings to become the number one industry website on the internet.

In terms of all aviation-related sites Flightglobal is now second only to popular photo site airliners.net in the Alexa charts.

Of course the higher up the Alexa rankings you go the bigger the leap needs to be in terms of traffic and audience in order to remain competitive. For example, a website maybe holding steady for their own traffic figures but slipping down in the Alexa rankings as sites like Twitter and youtube gain more share of global internet traffic.

The frenzy of activity on Flightglobal during June is therefore reflected in our recent gain of an additional 2,600 places in the Alexa rankings.

But to put that in perspective, if you're Facebook and ranked 4th in the world in terms of most popular sites - that's somewhere in the region of 50.6 billion pages views generated by 123.9 million unique visitors.

Flightglobal is currently ranked about 15,000th out of all the internet sites in the world - representing 7.1 million page views per month from 985,000 individual visitors.

Another aerospace website - AviationWeek.com is ranked as the 41,800th most popular site in the world which according to their figures reflects 1.75 million pages viewed from 300k unique visitors per month.

So an audience gap of 700,000 visitors and activity gap of 5.35 million pages views between flightglobal.com and aviationweek.com equates to 26,000 places (or websites) of difference.

But at the sharp end of the rankings the game changes significantly. The ranking gap between Flightglobal and Facebook is quite a bit smaller - only 15,000 places, but it actually represents a difference of 49 billion page views and 122 million users!

I was recently invited to have a tour around the Telegraph's much vaunted Hub Office in London.

Very impressive it is too - not least for the hundreds (literally) of journalists that dwell in the space that used to be a trading floor.

The chap who took us round was also pleased to show the four massive projectors beaming various images onto a large white wall on one side of the space.

The images consisted of the telegraph.co.uk home page, a twitter feed (via monitter.com), some Reuters stuff and a tiny little section for the top stories of the day.

The lack of emphasis on that last element surprised me somewhat. I mean what's more important to your operation? Checking that the story you published 10 minutes ago is, yep, still published, or that large numbers of visitors are searching for news on a breaking subject?

At the risk of banging our own drum a bit our own metrics screen puts that to shame slightly.

Our digital whiteboard displays live traffic metrics and the team use this information to aid decision making when reacting to real-time events and user behaviour. If the whiteboard shows our users are searching, viewing or consuming a specific topic then we will focus our efforts to cater for that information need in greater detail.

And to borrow from Steve Trimble, it's also a bit of Distance Early Warning for any live issues. E.g. if an area of the site goes down it's very obvious from the flatline that appears on the screen.

On a personal note I'm pleased to say that the board has been beaming down record figures for much of March and we look to be on course to achieve a record-breaking six million pages viewed for this month. That's a big number in anyone's books, although to be fair the telegraph.co.uk do about fours times that (but with how many staff ... ?).

Metric Man out.

As discovered by the Sun and then picked up by Aussie site news.com.au, Ryanair hostess Edita Schindlerova has appeared on X-rated websites posing in graphic photos showing her "having sex with a mystery man".

The thing for Flightglobal here is not that a stewardess has been up to some naughtiness, but that the news.com.au story linked to our lovely Ryanair Calender Girls Gallery on AirSpace and dumped thousands of visitors to Flightglobal this morning. It's 11am as I'm writing this and we've already had 100k page views on the site so far today. Not bad for a morning's work.

The other thing that springs to mind is I wonder how long before the inevitable Ryanair Press Release arrives putting some ludicrous spin on the revelation.

You can almost write the words yourself: "Ryanair fares are so hot even our stewardesses can't keep their clothes on" or something similar.

Flight journalist David Kaminski-Morrow recently broke a new record for the site, notching up a million page views so far this year.

Deputy news editor David demolished last year's efforts with a whole bunch of cracking stories, maximising their impact through the use of  videos and images to accompany the textual detail where possible. See below for a list of his top five.

The figures represent a huge increase on last year's best, when Max Kingsley-Jones scored 644,498 page views over the full twelve months. With four months of the year still to go, the annual record looks set to soar.

I think this step up in performance has many contriuting factors - it's not just David but all the Flight journalists that are pulling in more traffic than in 2007. However one key to their success is the use of our web analytics tool, which helps Flight journalists keep track of their performance, make sense of what works online and respond by tuning their output to the needs of the users.

David's top five stories:

• Lufthansa A320 escapes after wing-tip strike in Hamburg storm (56,317 page views)
• American investigates as 777 engine fails to respond to throttle (24,031 page views)
• Boeing investigates as Saudi 777 lands with wing damage (23,547 page views)
• ATR may have been damaged in 'barrel roll' (22,689 page views)
• Emirates A380 first-class cabin to have showers and private suites (22,233 page views)

I’m always surprised to see traffic coming onto the site on Christmas Day.

It’s probably self destructive of me to say so but for me on that particular day of the year browsing websites rarely features.

Having said that traffic was less than half of a normal day but still totalled nearly 70,000 pages viewed.

Curious as to what motivates you lot to put down your new iPhone or Wii and visit Flightglobal, I took a peek at the stats for 25th December.

Top 10

Nothing really running away with it but interesting to see jobs activity so high.

Usually the trend is to see a spike of job seeker traffic shortly after the New Year when the annual disillusionment sets in. However it seems that some folk couldn’t wait that long!

The rest of the content is a mix of the more lighthearted stuff you’d expect to see up there.

Social bookmarking sites are remarkable little things.

Rob Coppinger’s article NASA manned Mars mission details emerge was submitted to popular bookmarking site Digg.com yesterday and swiftly proved a winner.

Before long it was top of the Digg Science listings and had bagged over 1600 Diggs and 300 comments.

Referrals from all this activity was primarily responsible for the article’s impressive performance on Flightglobal. It received 29,529 views in 24 hours, single-handedly shipping in 16% of total site traffic for the day.

Ironically, the story wasn’t the lead story on Flightglobal, on the homepage or even lead story on the Space channel home page. Just shows you what we know …

Sadly, bookmarking traffic is notoriously hard to predict and to sustain. One day’s Digg champion is the next day’s internet flotsam.

Having said that, it’s a lovely bonus when it comes in and if you’re feeling in the mood I’d recommend you have a go at bookmarking any interesting stories you find on Flightglobal via the links at the bottom of each story.