R-bloggers in 2010: Top 14 R posts, site statistics and invitation for sponsors

A year ago (on December 9th 2009), I wrote about founding R-bloggers.com, an (unofficial) online R journal written by bloggers who agreed to contribute their R articles to the site.

In this post I wish to celebrate R-bloggers’ first birthday by sharing with you:

1. Links to the top 14 posts of 2010
2. Reflections about the origin of R-bloggers
3. Statistics on “how well” R-bloggers did this year
4. Links to other related projects
5. An invitation for sponsors/supporters to help keep the site alive

1. Top 14 R posts of 2010

R-bloggers’ success is largely owed to the content submitted by the R bloggers themselves.  The R community currently has 143 active R bloggers (links to the blogs are clearly visible in the right navigation bar on the R-bloggers homepage).  In a little over one year, these bloggers wrote almost 3,000 posts about R.  That is amazing!

Here is a list of the top visited posts on the site in 2010:

• 100 Prisoners, 100 lines of code
• Google AI Challenge: Languages Used by the Best Programmers
• Getting Started with Sweave: R, LaTeX, Eclipse, StatET, & TeXlipse
• Why Use R?
• “simply start over and build something better”
• R Tutorial Series: R Beginner’s Guide and R Bloggers Updates
• Select operations on R data frames
• Hacker News User Base Changed?
• Top 10 Algorithms in Data Mining
• Fantasy football (oops, soccer)
• Delete rows from R data frame
• Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R
• Advanced graphics in R
• How to build a world-beating predictive model using R

2. Motivation for creating R-bloggers

Originally, the idea for R-bloggers came when, over a year ago, I spent several hours trying to find bloggers who wrote about R.  I was successful in finding roughly 14 R bloggers (and too many blog posts of people talking about pirates).  This experience led me to wonder how many other people like myself were also struggling to find these bloggers.  The second thought I had was the answer to the following question: “What can I offer an R blogger so that he will tell me that he exists?”  The answer I came up with is “audience and traffic” – and that’s what R-bloggers tries to achieve: the site offers the blogger audience and traffic in exchange for the blogger giving permission to republish their “R content” on the site.

Part of my motivation was that, as one of these bloggers who wrote about R (here, on R-statistics.com), I too hoped to gain more audience and traffic for my content.   R-bloggers helped me achieve this goal.

3. Statistics – how well did R-bloggers do this year

There are several matrices one can consider when evaluating the success of a website.  I’ll present a few of them here and will begin by talking about the visitors to the site.

This year, the site was visited by about 286,000 “Absolute Unique Visitors.”  There was a total of nearly 600,000 visits and over 1 million page-views.  People have surfed the site from over 200 countries, with the greatest number of visitors coming from the United States (40%) and then followed by the United Kingdom (6.8%), Germany (6.6%), Canada (4.9%), France (3.3%), and other countries.

The site has received between 15,000 to 25,000 visits a week in the past few months, and I suspect this number will remain stable in the next few months (unless something very interesting will happen).

I believe this number will stay constant thanks to visitors’ loyalty: 60% of the site’s visits came from returning users.

Another indicator of reader loyalty is the number of subscribers to R-bloggers as counted by feedburner, which includes both RSS readers and e-mail subscribers.  The range of subscribers is estimated to be between 2600 to 2900.

Thus it seems that R-bloggers succeeds in offering a real service to the R users community.

4. Projects related to R-bloggers

During the last year I have created several R-bloggers clone sites in the hopes of serving other audiences.  I started a multilingual version of R-bloggers at www.r-bloggers.com/lang/ (currently hosting 7 bloggers, written in Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish).  I hope more will join the site in the future.

I’ve also started 3 other promising such sites: SAS-x.com, DanceBloggers.com and forex-bloggers.com.  How will they do?  Only time will tell.

5. Invitation to sponsor/advertise on R-bloggers

Due to the increase in the site’s popularity, 4 months ago I had to upgrade R-bloggers’ hosting account to a VPS hosting, which had directed me to decide on attempting to add ads to R-bloggers so to keep the site self sufficient financially.

So in the hopes of keeping the site sustainable in the long run, I am now (somewhat forced) to make this call: if you are interested in sponsoring/placing ads/supporting R-bloggers, then you’re welcome to contact me.

Happy new year!
Yours,
Tal Galili