Where IS Everybody?

I find that when I open A2K in the morning, there have not been that many postings in my absence.

I know that this is not my imagination:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=www.able2Know.com

[T]hings have really begun to settle down. [M]y perception is that the "old faithfuls" in the site, hung in during the slow times. Marginal members, who only had a tenuous connection to the site, probably gave up [..]. As a result, I find that when I open A2K in the morning, there have not been that many postings in my absence.

I know that this is not my imagination:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=www.able2Know.com

How to [..] try to get back some of the old members, who give up on the site, and to attract new members?

I have been posting on A2K since the beginning of the site. I have loved the intellectual level of many of its members, and always found many fascinating threads to which I became involved. [..]

Recently though, I have found that except for a few of the diehard regulars, that A2K does not seem to be bringing in new members of the intellectual quality of past times. In addition, I am perceiving an attrition of many of the regulars, who have either left, of are posting on a less regular basis.

I know that it is not my imagination, as the traffic has decreased over the last few months:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.able2know.com/

[..] What do you think can be done to bring in some new "blood" of the high calibre of which we have become accustomed?

A2K traffic actually did drop then level last year, but that alexa graph isn't going to accurately show it (Alexa is only reliably accurate for about the top 100 sites on the internet, I could raise our ranking by a few thousand points over the weekend if I'd like and I've shown some private groups this in the past when I boosted it up to 5000s coming from off the charts in the span of 3 days).

See, when we were at our highest traffic ranking on Alexa we were actually at our lowest levels of traffic.

Alexa combines unique visitors with page views to acheive a traffic ranking. In the beginning we had a much higher pageviews/visit ratio because we had mostly regulars and fewer guests.

As A2K grew more popular we got more and more visitors who just land, see the info they were looking for and move on. This lowers our Alexa rank drastically even though traffic exploded and our reach multiplied.

Alexa's calculations are all ratios. For example, the reach ratio is a number per million internet users.

So yahoo, for example with about 28% reach of internet users would have an alexa reach rank of about 280,000.

[..] Think of it as a market share measurement and for sites to go up in the ranking they not only have to be growing in traffic but growing in the total share of internet traffic.

So a site's traffic can actually grow while the alexa rank diminishes even if the alexa statistics are accurate.

I am looking at Phoenix' statistic link and see over 10,000 Indians
hitting a2k daily Who knew?