It’s been over five years since The Heavy Table first started doing reader surveys. Back then, we were asking about RSS readers, if you’d joined Facebook or not, and how many times you visited the site. These days, we’re more curious about how you’re finding out about our content and if you’re using things like Pinterest, Swarm, and Snapchat. (If you’d like to jump right in and take the survey, please have at it.)
Of course, it’s only fair if you’d like us to share some of our information first.
Our traffic trends are like many other sites: These days, by percentage, more people coming over from social networks opposed to typing in “heavytable.com” in their browser.
Here’s our traffic, by month, since birth in February 2009:
We have a solid and loyal following. We recognize it’s niche and doesn’t cater to everyone.
We have peaks around State Fair time thanks to our extensive coverage, and that major peak in June 2013 is from an April Fool’s joke in 2011 about Prince’s Fridge that, while quite humorous, went viral internationally and unexpectedly.
Regarding social media, cumulatively over the years, just shy of 30 percent of our traffic coming from other sites has been referrals from Facebook. Over 10 percent has been from Twitter. Social media played the largest role in awareness of the site in its first couple years, and now social media plays the largest role in people finding our content.
Our readers have been using their phones and tablets to visit at higher proportions throughout time:
By May 2014, 25 percent of our traffic is from mobile devices and 11 percent are using tablets.
As the world continues to change, we’d love to hear from you so we can serve you better:
Click here to complete the Summer 2014 Reader Survey
Thank you,
Aaron Landry
Producer