LIBRARYTHING BOOK SUGGESTER UPDATE

I find this last particularly interesting as on March 5th of this year, Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly publishers, and with just under 1.5m followers on twitter) tweeted Bookseer: In terms of referrals, Lifehacker sent a chunk of traffic (16,745) but pretty much all in one day. I know very little about stumbleupon but that’s a huge slice of our visitors. Stumbleupon sends a whopping 56.47% of traffic our way. What’s also interesting is the impressive growth of these terms in the last 6 months: Which is great as this demonstrates the need that the bookseer is trying to fulfil.

stripping out variants on “bookseer” are: The most common “non-branded” search terms, i.e. Non-branded / organic search: ‘what should I read next’ or ‘i’ve just finished reading’ (and derivatives) account for 30% of search (1.23% of visits)Īs of today, bookseer is ranked no 8 for ‘ what should I read next‘.Branded – 70% of search terms are around ‘book seer’ (or a derivative).Search falls into two camps – branded and non-branded keywords. This is a bit disappointing, and we should work on that.

Why (and how?) do People Come to Bookseer?ĩ6% of our traffic comes from referrals, and only 4% comes from search. Oh and The Bible is quite a fun one, in terms following the author names attached to it: Ignoring the home page, I think that means we have had 104,883 different titles entered into the system.Īnd, whilst you might think lots of them have just been entered once (by the author?!) it is not until the 44,008th title (”كتاب السير”) that we start to see single searches. I am also amazed and thrilled that we have had 104,886 different pages viewed in the period since launch. The Road? On the Road? 1984? What a literate bunch of people with great taste inhabit the site. I’m delighted that the top 10, whilst influenced by Meyer and Rowling, contains some of the greatest works of literature from the 20th and 21st Century. In fact, I’m certain that’s what lots of people do, and this is why we have such a diverse spread of titles ( over 104,000 different books have been entered into the Bookseer). I have a little theory that many people come to the site and test out their favourite book and see what comes back. Rowling: “Harry Potter” is, obviously, not the name of a book. I find it interesting that whilst people search on a book name (”Twilight”) for Stephenie Meyer, they do a generic one for J.K. Obviously the two big titles are the Twilight and Harry Potter series. The only title to receive more than 1,000 page views as a landing page is The Dispossessed, just outside the top 20. Note that these appear to be genuine searches (rather than being distorted, for example by referrals from popular sites direct to results pages).

The Catcher in the Rye (note double entry with above)Īnd many more.

Without further ado, here are the most popular recommendations asked of the Bookseer in the past 10 months: There is also some amazing loyalty: 5.47% of users visited the site more than 9 times. We think this shows that these visitors have a genuine interest in finding another book.Įncouragingly, these visitors have increased a lot in the past few months. People who search organically for “ what should i read next” and find have a significantly lower bounce rate (27%), spend twice as long on the site (3m 23s) and view almost four pages, when compared to the average. Stumbleupon) and those who find the site through search. There are two main types of visitors: those who are “referred” to the site by a link on another site (e.g. What is also interesting is the difference in usage shown by the different type of visitors.

then it’s Brazil, Australia, Russia, Germany, Ireland….

42,143 are from the UK (overwhelmingly, London).

47,879 are from Canada (really evenly spread out actually).

519,249 are from the USA (mostly California, then New York, then Texas).

1,839,702 pageviews have been recorded (2.49 pages per view) and a bounce rate of 40.41%.Īcross all visitors, there is an average stay of 1m 27 seconds, and 80% of our visitors are first-timers here. Since launch (June 1, 2009) until April 21st, 2010, we’ve had 739,565 visits, 592,969 of which are absolutely unique.

LIBRARYTHING BOOK SUGGESTER UPDATE

We (well, James) built it quite quickly, and I blogged the results after the pretty insane first month.Īnd now the dust has settled, I thought I’d update that with some stats for the first 10 months. The site would then go and query Amazon, Librarything and other booky API services, and deliver you some recommendations for what to read next. It would be as simple as Google: a search box asking for the last book you read (and enjoyed).

The site had a single purpose: to recommend new books to readers who have just finished something. We launched the Bookseer in June last year. 26/04/10 A Year in the Life of a Book Recommender

Librarything book suggester