Do we have an idea of how many people read Git Rev News?

[chriscool]

I think it could be interesting to have an estimate of how many people, and if possible too what kind of people, read Git Rev News each month, for a number of reasons:

• The trend over the months and years could be some kind of long term feedback.
• If we see that some months more people read it, maybe it could give an idea about which kind of content is preferred.
• If it looks like people reading it could be interested in participating in Git development, maybe we could add content to help them or encourage them.
• If it looks like people reading it could be interested in participating in Git Rev News, maybe we could take advantage of that too.

So can we have a an idea of the number of views of the different pages on https://git.github.io/? Can we have the number of subscribers to the email edition of the newsletter?

@jnareb, @mjaix, @sivaraam, @stepnem what do you think about this?

[sivaraam]

Getting analytics on our reader base would indeed be a beneficial thing. I'm unsure if we could get historical data, though. We would need to add some analytics solution (hopefully we can setup some FOSS one).

Or if I'm missing anything about existing data, kindly let me know.

[benknoble]

Downloads of RSS feeds would also feed ;) in to the data

[jnareb]

I assume that GitHub does not offer an analytics feature for GitHub Pages websites; there is the "Insights" tab with "Traffic", but it count access to repo, not to the deployed GitHub Page.

See https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/31474

[chriscool]

@jnareb yeah, it looks like GitHub does not offer analytics features for GitHub Pages websites.

@sivaraam, thanks for the link to some FOSS analytics solution.

@benknoble, yeah ideally it would be nice to count the RSS feeds too.

According to git/git-scm.com#2054 it looks like git-scm.com is using CloudFlare, so perhaps we should use that too. It's not FOSS but looks like free, lightweight and privacy-focused (no cookies).

If we ever move to git-scm.com at least we would be already familiar with it.

[jnareb]

Well, the number of people that read Git Rev News should be larger than the number of people that answered the Git Rev News Reader Survey 2023 (in edition #100), not that it matters much with 11 (or 15) responses :-(.

[chriscool]

Would someone mind if we install CloudFlare?

[mjaix]

Mailchimp offers some statistics, but they of course apply only to the readers who use the mail as a starting point.