Everday I notice there's like 100 guests or more.....man, there's a lot of people out there wanting to make pizza and that's just on our site alone.
I wonder how many of them are return guests and I just think it's kinda interesting that a core of around 100 always seem present.....
Bob,
I have attempted to study the relationship of the number of guests to the number of members. Unfortunately, there is no easy way of doing this from in front of the curtain (maybe Steve, the owner of the forum, can do it from behind the curtain), because the numbers change in real time and also vary depending on the time of day and the time of year (usually related to seasons, with summers being slower than winters). For example, if you look at the ratio of guests to members at 3:00AM, when most of us in the U.S. are asleep, there can be a ratio of guests to members of 50 to 1, with most of those guests being from countries where the people are awake while we in the U.S. are asleep. Normally, however, I would say that the median ratio of members to guests is around 7 to 1. But, that is only a median number, not an average number.
It is also important to keep in mind that guests see a lot less of what is on the forum than members. For example, since guests cannot conduct searches, they have to use the forum indexes to find things, such as recipes. Try logging off sometime and try to find something. It is very difficult and time consuming. I have concluded that many guests decide to register because it is so easy to do and makes their lives so much easier. As a result, if a guest doesn't register, that suggests to me that the guest has only a casual interest in pizza. I would put many of them in the "just looking" category.
I also look at the number of people, both guests and members, who are on the forum at any given time. That number for some while has been around 150. But that number tends to go down in the summer when fewer people are making pizza and to go up in the winter when more people are making pizza. That number can also jump at certain times, as around Super Bowl time or a major holiday or other event where people are more motivated to make pizza.
I think the key number to watch is the number of members, but keep in mind that most of those members remain on the sidelines most of the time, as lurkers or bystanders, not as active participants. At any given time, there is only a small group of active, or core, participants on the forum, and even then they come and go. It is like a repertory theatre with a constantly changing cast of characters.
As Don pointed out, there are also various spiders that regularly comb the forum to collect information for their search engines and maybe to conduct activites that are advertising related. I am not sure whether they are included in the number of "guests".
Peter
