Madness

[mbarrick]

I just posted about this in the gothicbc community, but want to say a bit more about it here. The past May, for the first time ever, http://www.gothic.bc.ca topped one million hits. That's up from the whopping 7 I had during the first month of the site's existence in August 1999.

This is a graph of hits, page views, and unique visitors per month since the site first went up. Hits and page views are read against the left-hand scale, unique visitors are read against the right-hand scale. I've noted a few events that impacted traffic on the graph. C6 Gallery Added - In June 2000 I added the first photo gallery on the site. The spike it represents is insiginificant on this graph, but at the time it was huge. Later that summer I reworked the code for the C6 gallery into the beginnings of the current Gothic BC photo gallery. The first pictures went in October 15th, 2000. In the summer of 2001 I finally got around to buying myself a half-decent camera and the gallery really started to take off (noting the big spike in unique visitors). North Van. - Moving to North Vancouver in February 2002 sent the site as a whole into a bit of a nose-dive. For a number of reasons it was nearly the end of Gothic BC. Goth-Block Fire - In October 2002 I moved back into town, and despite the building I moved into nearly burning down two weeks later and there being no power for over a week, things started to build again as I was more involved in the scene again. Things started growing pretty steadily again. Newspapers - But the last six month the site has really begun to take off. The catalyst for this, ironically, was a bunch of bad press fuelled by ignorant sensationalism.

I see two things at work in the graph. It is a graph of the strength of interest in the scene here in general, with the dips in the general trend a function of my involvement and participation in the scene and ability to put time (and money) into the site. Note that the curve appears to be logarithmic... are we on the verge of a Goth Renaissance?