What do you make of the HP stats?

1. 88

   Cardisaposted 10 years ago

   I was updating my HP review hub and saw the vast difference in published hubs and published users compared to 2012. See below:-
   
   Hubpages stats as of September 6th, 2012, there were:
   
       1,158,727 - PUBLISHED HUBS
       147,603 - PUBLISHED USERS
       160,623 - QUESTIONS
       566,918 - ANSWERS
       2,183,226 - FORUM POST
       21 - STAFF MEMBERS
   
   
   HubPages by the Numbers as of February 17th, 2014, there are:
   
       884,880 Published Hubs
       67,838 Published Users
       173,817 Questions
       715,497 Answers
       2,534,657 Forum Posts
       and 18 Staff Members
   
   Is this good or bad? Does this have anything to do with the QAP or are people just fed up and leaving for some reason? I am more concerned about the reduction in membership than hubs. I know some really crappy hubs were removed. Why did so many people leave? More than 50%!

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   1. 93

      Cre8torposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      I see that it's a microwave society. People like the quick interaction of the forums and Q&A but don't want to take the time to produce quality content.
      
      Unless I'm misunderstanding much of what I read, Google is cracking down on low end content. If what HP is doing is emphasizing quality to strengthen it's reputation on the net and insure its' longevity, I'm okay with it. I think many who left were expecting a Bubblews type site and when they found out it wasn't and that HP actually wants GOOD content, they split. Sometimes to grow or strengthen a reputation, sacrifices need to be made. Again, perhaps I'm way off with my assessment but looking around the net, more people want to write about their morning coffee than anything with value. I've said it before when concerns like this arise, I can't imagine HP is trying to sabotage itself with a QAP...I think it's trying to weed out poor content and increase its' quality membership. (quality over quantity is a good thing I believe) Not to say everyone who left was a poor writer but you know as well as I, you can't succeed here without effort and that's something that sadly, many don't want to give...effort.

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      1. 74

         Barbara Kayposted 10 years agoin reply to this

         But a lot of our excellent writers left. Hubpages did change their policy about not featuring hubs for long time established writers here, but it was too late for some of them. Maybe some writers just moved on to other careers though.
         
         I myself will stay here. It is still the best writer site on the web.

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   2. 74

      Barbara Kayposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      A lot of writers removed hubs that became unfeatured. I had 218 hubs myself and now have only have 179 left. It just made more sense to place them on my own websites if they weren't showing up in Google.
      
      I don't recommend doing it. Even though these hubs weren't featured, they still got traffic. My earnings went down after I did it.

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   3. STAFF

      pauldeedsposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      There is a natural attrition in engagement with HubPages.  It's not uncommon for people to sign up, publish a few hubs and then get bored, get a job, start publishing somewhere else, or whatever.   Over the course of years many such accounts will accumulate.
      
      But, we want Hubbers that are active, successful, and that stand behind their content.  So, in 2012 we began the process of unpublishing the hubs of authors that have not logged in to their account for more than a year if they do not either log in or click a link in a warning email that we send. That process is the primary cause of the declines you see there in both published hubs and published users from 2012 to now.  The good news is what we've dealt with most of the accumulated backlog and we are nearing equilibrium.  Hopefully, in 2014 we'll actually see those numbers start to rise again.

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      1. 88

         Cardisaposted 10 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks Paul. As I said, I was more concerned about the reduced membership more so than hubs since I know a lot of spam/low quality and plagiarized content have been removed.

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         1. STAFF

            pauldeedsposted 10 years agoin reply to this

            Those statistics show publisher users, which means Hubbers with at least 1 published Hub.  If we unpublish all of someone's hubs because they were inactive or they were spam or whatever, then they no longer count toward that total.

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      2. 78

         LuisEGonzalezposted 10 years agoin reply to this

         Since we are in the subject of stats, I have noticed some of my Analytics views go from hundreds to less than half (280 in the morning and 80 in the afternoon, and these are not real numbers just used for example)  in the same day. It is as if there was an error. Is this normal and not something to be concerned with?

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         1. 62

            RonHawkposted 10 years agoin reply to this

            Have you been tracking the source of the hits to see if you can establish a pattern for where they are coming from?  For instance, if you're getting hits from Europe or Asia, obviously the hit rate would be lower during their nights, contributing to the difference between morning/afternoon hits.

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         2. STAFF

            pauldeedsposted 10 years agoin reply to this

            Yes that's normal.  Traffic across all hubs peaks around 10am pacific time at a level that's about 30% above the median and about 60% above the trough which occurs at about 2am pacific time.

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            1. 78

               LuisEGonzalezposted 10 years agoin reply to this

               I forgot to be more specific. The views are from the previous day. When I look at the previous days views they appear as over a certain amount and when I look at them again  a few hours later they have come down to less than half.

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2. 88

   NateB11posted 10 years ago

   I'm inclined to think it has to do with the clean up, stopping and tossing out of spam and low-quality content, etc. No way for me to know that, but that's what seems reasonable. It seems logical that if you have quality on a user-generated content site it's going to reduce quantity of both users and content. QAP will keep the quality at that level or make it better. From what I can tell, it's working. HP is doing better, in terms of traffic and the search engine.

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3. 88

   lobobrandonposted 10 years ago

   It doesn't say users. It says published users. There are thousands of people with just one hub and that hub may not be featured. Such people wouldn't show as published users.

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   1. 95

      wildernessposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      Sure they would.  An unfeatured hub is available for reading just as much as a featured one.  It isn't being found by google, but it is published just as surely as any other.

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4. 31

   Writer Foxposted 10 years ago

   'Published Hubs' does not mean featured Hubs.  Right now, there are only 362,472 featured Hubs on the site and another 125,528 pages indexed by Google from the HP Blog, Forum and Questions.

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5. 88

   raymondphilippeposted 10 years ago

   These are interesting observations. The number of published hubs per person have risen. That may suggest that the remaining writers are doing more on hubpages. I guess many of the hubs that are no longer here where there primarily for link building purposes.

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6. 89

   Rock_njposted 10 years ago

   Startling!  That's what I think of it.  Published Users and Hubs really started declining rapidly when writers were upset about Hubs being idled.  I thought it would have leveled off by now.  I wonder when the downdraft will end?

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   1. 31

      Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      As I posted above, there are 362,472 featured Hubs on the site out of 884,880 published Hubs.  (On October 14, 2013, there were 366,146 featured Hubs.) If you go back to September, 2012, that's when the change was made to not make all Hubs available to search engines (NoIndex). Shortly before that, the switch to subdomains was made.
      
      Other changes at HP since 2012 include the QAP process, 'Boot Camp' for new Hubbers, and a minimum Hubber Score of 85 to have followed links to other websites.  (You could also add to that a much lower CPM today for the HP Ad Program compared to two years ago.) Naturally, the number of published users has diminished and that was probably part of the plan when the changes were made.

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7. 92

   Jodahposted 10 years ago

   Still sort of on topic. I'm just wondering what is the requirement or advice on how to get your hubs ranked higher on the 'featured' hubs search pages. I have 86 hubs all featured, but most are not within the first 5 or 6 pages of the hub search even in their particular catagory. Three are even 'editors' choice. My only problem is that I noticed a lot of those ahead of mine have maybe 1 or 2 followers and no comments, whereas I have 158 followers and most hubs have at least 40 comments. This is obviously not a requirement, just interested to know what is?

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   1. 88

      Cardisaposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      The hubs on those pages are ranked based on popularity. In other words those hubs are hot!

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      1. 62

         ilikegamesposted 10 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks for this answer, I've been wondering the exact same thing because I saw one of mine was on one of these featured pages.

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   2. 31

      Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      Do you mean the order in which they are listed on the Topic Pages? http://hubpages.com/topics/all/1
      
      If so, I don't have a clue.  It's not based on number of visits or number of recent visits because my Hubs are not shown in that order on the Topic Pages. I do know that a brand new Hub will appear temporarily on the first page of a Topic subcategory.

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      1. 92

         Jodahposted 10 years agoin reply to this

         yes I did mean the topics page Writer Fox. Thanks.

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         1. 31

            Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this

            I hope an HP employee will answer this.  Perhaps you should start a new thread on the Forum so it will be discussed.

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         2. 88

            Cardisaposted 10 years agoin reply to this

            Jodah, let me make myself a little clearer and hope you understand. I don't know if you were here when hubs were categorized where people could filter the best scored hubs, the hottest and the newest. What HP did was remove that from the front end. The hubs you now see displayed on the categories pages are the hubs which gain the most traffic within the site within a 24 hour period.  These are hubs which are popular or hot within the HP community.
            
            You may have a hub which gets lots of Google traffic and not show up on that page, yet, a hub with a lot of HP visitors will show up there. It has nothing to do with the amount of comments made on the hub.
            
            In addition, every time the system updates, the list also updates. You may a see a hub that is two years old show up there as well as a newly published hub. If you happened to have a hub that shows up there, take a look at your stats.
            The last hub I had show up there was the hub on making money for Christmas, which got about 300 views in two days. After the third or fourth day when the views dwindled it went to second, then third page, then it eventually  disappeared. Most of these views were from within the community. Every time I have a hub show up there it's the same thing, a spike in my HP readers.

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8. 62

   RonHawkposted 10 years ago

   I was producing about 2 hubs a week 2 years ago and I was having fun in the process.  As I started tweaking them to increase traffic HP started to flag them.  In just about each case after I spoke to the moderator and explained things (and made modifications) they released the hubs but as time went on I realized it was just too much effort to get anything out.  It was certainly dampening creativity.  Eventually it got to be too much.  I wonder how many writers lost their motivation that way and left.  I realize all sites want to have high quality but if they leave the job of overseeing things to automation it'll backfire in the long run.

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9. 78

   kerlund74posted 10 years ago

   I have just been here for a bit more than a week now. I don't have so much to come up with in this matter. But I do like the Quality-check, I do believe it will give a better content quality. Reading should be a pleasure:) Trying to get my first hub featured I had to try and reedit two times. After proofreading and some grammar fix I made it. I have not much clue about kewwords and SEO, my travel there has just began... But I do love to write.

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   1. 92

      Jodahposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      Well done kerlund74. Getting your first hub published is a great first step. Enjoy your writing experience here. I agree, reading should be a pleasure. I don't study SEO's or keywords at all, so I suppose that explains why my hubs aren't higher on the search page. If what makes a hub hot is what attracts the most Google searches and is based on 'keywords' rather than quality it all makes sense. Don't get me wrong some of those highly featured hubs are great, but some of the topics leave me scratching my head.

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      1. 78

         kerlund74posted 10 years agoin reply to this

         My goal is first of all to write, share and read others interesting hubs. I think (maybe I'm naive) that writing just for Google maybe not allways makes the readers happy.

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10. 67

    younghopesposted 10 years ago

    To me Hubpages is the best site to write for, i enjoy writing here though featured-unfeatured hubs does annoy me sometimes. However in comparison to wizzley and seekyt (where too i write) i found it to be the best

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    1. 92

       Jodahposted 10 years agoin reply to this

       I agree younghopes. Hub Pages is the best writing site I have come across and I write what pleases me not to please Google.

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11. 0

    ahorsebackposted 10 years ago

    "I write so that I might know myself "......Browning? , Tennison ?,  Its a good thing I don't write to eat ,  but hell  ya , Hubs seems to be taking an unwanted dive in connectivity  ,especially between  hubber to hubber !  I'm a poet so I can't expect to be treated like a real writer ! I know that !  So I have decided to start being a real writer ....."My next Hub ?  How to open a can of soup "with flare " on a regular basis !........watch my score climb folks , I'm agonna be a big wheel !

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    1. 92

       Jodahposted 10 years agoin reply to this

       Yes a horseback, I know where you are coming from as I'm chiefly a poet as well. I have started branching out into articles (usually with a poem contained within) and a few short stories to try to improve my worth. I did notice that hubs like "how to make the worlds best onion soup" are the popular way to go, so looking forward to reading your "how to open a can of soup" hub...just throw a poem in there and I'll be happy...lol.

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       1. 31

          Writer Foxposted 10 years agoin reply to this

          Poetry Hubs can do very well here so long as you use good SEO like you should use on any Hub.  My poetry Hubs have received over 42,000 views in the past 30 days and I only have a few of them. 
          
          Use the subject matter of your poetry as the title of the Hub and use the keyword phrase you are targeting in the commentary.  If you do this, searchers who are looking for poetry on a particular subject or with a specific theme will find your work through search engines.

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          1. 92

             Jodahposted 10 years agoin reply to this

             Thanks for that good advice Writer Fox.

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