IPVM Top Reports and Reader Stats for 2010

JH
John Honovich
•Published Dec 22, 2010 00:00 AM
PUBLIC - This article does not require an IPVM subscription. Feel free to share.

In this report, we review the top read reports for the year and provide an overview of who is reading IP Video Market.

Let's start with the top 5 read reports by number of reads. They are:

All of them had at least 7,000 reads each with the VMS report being the most read at ~13,000.

We are quite glad to see that these reports were well read as the research (and testing) behind each was quite significant (at least a few hundred hours per report).

By contrast, an 'average' report is read about 1,500 to 2,000 in the first 2 months from publication.

One other very interesting trend was the extreme popularity of the Camera Finder. We launched it less than 3 months ago and it's already been used over 14,000 times. We expect this to become our most used feature in 2011.

Monthly Usage

The image below provides an overview of how many people are using IP Video Market. We used the most recent 30 days. You can see a little more than 43,000 visits were made to the site during the month.

The graphic also shows that the site is most used during the middle of week which makes sense because it's a business/work oriented site.

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About 120,000 pages are visited per month. Since we show reports on a single page regardless of length, this likely under-represents views. Most security sites use short pages (primarily to boost ad rates). I find short pages and multiple clicks frustrating so we do not do that.

Outbound links: Notice that readers clicked from our site to other websites over 6,700 times in the month. We include hundreds of new links to other sites every month to help readers learn more about new products, technologies and perspectives. It's unfortunately rare for our industry as most mags and analysts infrequently link or cite others.

A strange and unplanned side-effect of our linking practices is that for most manufacturers we are a Top 5 or Top 10 traffic referrer (often higher than the sites they advertise in). For instance, in a week, from the Axis 'study' review, we sent about 300 readers to Axis's website. Yesterday, we sent over 100 people to Ubiquiti's. Even for the companies we criticize, our coverage is often valuable to exposing them to high quality surveillance professionals. 

A few other metrics that might be of interest:

  • Direct traffic: Over 60% of visits are from people directly coming to the site (typing in the URL, bookmarks, etc.). This is a high percentage and reflects a strong level of interest in the site.
  • Search traffic: Less than 30% of visits are from search engines (e.g., Google, etc.). This is very low for the security industry. Many sites get 70% or more of their traffic from search engines. We'd like more people to find the site via search. On the other hard, direct traffic generally shows higher engagement with the content.

Country Visits Breakdown

Below is a breakdown of monhtly visits from the top 12 countries visiting IPVM:

Of course, the US, our home market is by far the largest. However, it's only 40% overall, meaning almost 60% of readers are from outside the US. While we are US based, the site certainly has global reach (much different than trade magazines who generally have web readership heavily concentrated in their home region).

A few other comments on readership:

  • Taiwan and South Korea readership is well out of proportion to their country size and percentage of English readers. We suspect there's a lot of small manufacturers and component suppliers who regularly use IPVM to stay informed of trends and technology.
  • The country we do the worst, relative to size, is the UK. I suspect it's a combination of factors - some unique requirements, locally strong manufacturers and a number of UK based magazines/sites.
  • In over 60 countries, we have 100 or more visits per month (e.g., UAE - 245, Nigeria - 148, Iran - 122). It's fairly interesting to see the broad reach the Internet provides.