CleanTechnica’s Birthday!! (10 Fun Stats)

Technically, CleanTechnica‘s first post was on February 7, 2008. However, history can be complicated. In CleanTechnica‘s case, the site was born around that time as one site in a green-focused media network known as Green Options (GO) Media. At some point in 2009, GO Media was sold to Virgance, a “social business incubator.” As far as I’m aware, at its height, Virgance owned Carrot Mob, One Block Off The Grid (1BOG), Lend Me Some Sugar, and GO Media. As Virgance put it when setting up its LinkedIn account way back then, “These endeavors are natural intersections between activism and a new form of capitalism and are greatly contributing to the new paradigm shift that business needs.” Virgance ended up completely morphing into 1BOG, as I understand it, and CleanTechnica (as well as the rest of GO Media) thus ended up being owned by 1BOG*. In 2010, the network (minus CleanTechnica and Gas2) was spun back out to the founder, David Anderson, and the network was rebranded as Important Media. A few months later, CleanTechnica and Gas2 joined the party. At that point, David asked me to become CleanTechnica‘s “Director/Editor.”

Anyway, all of that is to say: in the process of the final change of hands, our analytics/statistics services got rebooted. So, “the beginning of CleanTechnica” in our stats is September 9, 2010. So, that’s what I now consider to be the site’s “birthday” (for some purposes).

With three years under our belts, I thought I’d pull out some fun stats to share with you all. Here are 10 stats (or, to be precise, stat groups) that I find particularly interesting/fun:

1. 17,699,999 lifetime pageviews.
2. 79.9% of visits (slightly different from pageviews) were from browsers set to American English. Behind that, the top languages were:
   British English (3.75%)
   English, non-specified (2.99%)
   French (1.68%),
   German (1.53%),
   Spanish (1.49%),
   Dutch (1.29%). Even with just 1.29% of visits, though, people using browsers set to Dutch accounted for 148,900 pageviews. Pretty cool to think that so many people around the world are checking in on CleanTechnica!
3. 57.6% of CleanTechnica visits came from computers located in the US.
   6.14% came from Canada,
   5.62% came from the UK,
   3.27% came from Australia,
   3.15% came from India,
   1.71% came from Germany,
   1.41% came from France,
   1.38% came from the Netherlands,
   1.01% came from Spain. Even with just 1.01%, 122,531 visits came from Spain. Not quite the 6,955,472 that came from the US, but certainly not insignificant!
4. The largest percentage/number of visits came from Internet Explorer (yikes! people, switch to Chrome or Firefox!). The percentage & number from the browser of yesteryear were 29.78% / 3,596,630. Chrome was second (26.07% / 3,147,968), Firefox was third (22.77% / 2,749,383), and Safari was fifth (13.54% / 1,634,748).
5. 86.11% of visits were made on a desktop computer, 9.15% were made on a non-tablet mobile device, and 4.74% were made on a tablet. (Granted, this doesn’t include visits to a printed article. I know that many teachers do use articles we publish in the lesson plans.)
6. When it comes to which devices they used, 33.78% of visits (from a device) came from an Apple iPhone, while a similar 32.76% came from an Apple iPad. Third in line (other than the 6.7% “not set”) was the SonyEricsson LT15i Xperia Arc at just 1.13%. Wow, talk about a company dominating a market!
7. Our top 5 articles in the past 3 years were:
   – Thin-Film Solar Power To Be Sold For Less Than Coal Power (202,419 views)
   – Graphene Breakthrough — One Photon Can Be Converted Into Multiple Electrons (151,643 views)
   – Smack! Was That A Mosquito You Killed, Or A Drone? (133,077 views)
   – Top Five Micro Wind Turbines (119,332 views)
   – 10 Key Clean Energy Statements From Obama’s Climate Speech (93,716 views)
8. As far as where readers came from, Google led the way, sending us 32.13% of visits (3,880,389). There’s a reason people say the internet is ruled by Google…. At least Google is a benevolent king that is into clean energy. Behind Google, the top referrers were:
   Direct Traffic (e.g., people typing in the address to one of our articles, pages, or homepage) — 31.36% (3,786,468 visits)
   Feedburner Feed — 6.41% (774,525)
   StumbleUpon — 4.04% (487,971)
   reddit — 3.15% (380,812)
   Facebook — 2.45% (296,282)
   Google News — 1.72% (207,809)
   People, clearly, you like our content. Share more of it! 😀
9. As far as visits directly to category archives, the top categories were:
   Solar Energy — 16.61% (59,164 views)
   Clean Energy — 10.33% (36,779)
   Wind Energy — 7.21% (25,707)
   Energy Efficiency — 7.18% (25,560)
   Consumer Tech — 4.72% (16,793)
   Transportation Tech — 4.27% (15,173)
   Electric Vehicles — 2.01% (7,145)
10. In October 2010, we had 197,788 pageviews. In August 2013, we had 824,318 pageviews. In other words, we’re growing! Here’s a graph of monthly pageviews since Sept 2010:

Interesting? I hope so. I found it all quite interesting.

*We currently have a financial partnership with 1BOG. We help people go solar through 1BOG. We get a portion of its cut from the deal. One of our main foci is of course encouraging people to go solar, so we think this is a perfect fit for us.

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