by Craig J. Peterson
Oct. 31, 2005 (c) TrueAggies.com

State of the Website

LOGAN , Utah - It has been interesting to watch the statistical numbers for TrueAggies.com from month to month. Each year the numbers continue to climb. Basketball has been the driving force of the site, yet the current football season has seen remarkable increases in visitors. Obviously photographs have been the main draw and that continues to be the case. The following article lists some of the interesting information coming from the statistics for TrueAggies.com.

The number of advertisements viewed from the site is at an all-time high. TrueAggies.com operates on the funds generated by users clicking on advertisements and clicking on sponsored sites while searching from TrueAggies.com using the Google Search tool. The revenue from Google Ads pays for the hosting service to cover the bandwidth costs and monthly fees. It is imperative that the funds generated from Google ads climbs at the same rate or faster than the page hits and bandwidth for the site. So far that is happening.

Photographs continue to be the most popular feature of the site followed closely by the new Blog. The majority of hits to the site can be attributed directly to photographs. The most popular photographs on the site are consistently USU Spirit Squad photographs. Almost without exception, the highest viewed images from an event are the corresponding Spirit Squad photographs from that event. Occasionally a spectacular catch in football or a fascinating slam-dunk in basketball will break the trend, but there are rare instances of this happening. The main departure from this is an obscure photograph of Kevin Robinson catching a kickoff that someone obviously has bookmarked and set as their home page. The old Troy Rolle Dunk photo by Lynn Kay is still very popular as well.

The top visitors to TrueAggies.com come from Utah State University 's computer network. The USU proxy servers are consistently the first and second ranked visitors. Interestingly there are several computers in the athletic department consistently in the top 20 visitors to the site. Users of Comcast High-Speed Internet round out the top five each month.

The majority of visitors come from the United States . New Zealand and the Czech Republic hold their own in accessing the site with the Czech Republic making higher showings during volleyball season and Brazil showing up during basketball season. Countries providing more than 100 hits in a month include: Denmark , Canada , Australia , Germany , Japan , Dominican Republic , United Kingdom , Mexico , Netherlands , Sweden , and Italy .

Users of Microsoft Internet Explorer make up the top 79% of the browsers viewing the site and 90% are using Microsoft Windows operating systems. Netscape accounts for approximately 10% of the browsers used to access the site. There are many other operating systems used, but none account for more than 4% alone. There are numerous operating systems being used including many cell phones and handheld systems.

The most searched for people on the site are: Chris Cooley, Kevin Curtis, Ramsi Stoker, Spencer Nelson, and Brent Guy in that order. Super Dunk, Aerial Tissue, and Aggie Cheerleaders are some of the other often searched words on the site. One person found the site doing a search for "hot college coed wallpaper." I can't imagine how far down the list of sites TrueAggies.com happened to be when searching for that string of words. I guess that proves some people do look at the several hundred pages of Websites returned when doing obscure searches on Google.

I have no idea how popular the official Website of Utah State University Athletics is, I haven't asked them for any data (if anyone knows I would be very interested to find out the numbers). I assume it is visited much more frequently than TrueAggies.com, probably by many times. It would be interesting to compare however. I will end this article by including a graph of the number of hits TrueAggies.com has seen at the site over the past few years. We are on track to break 3 million hits for 2005 which is more than double that of last year. Thanks for your support and keep coming back (and don't be afraid to visit our sponsored ad links either :) ).