I know that AnswerSwarm just concluded at the turn of the UTC clock, but am curious if it had a positive net affect on traffic. Was there a noticeable increase in site traffic?
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Relevant: meta.gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/3203/…– CruelCowCommented Mar 21, 2013 at 10:29
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From a quick look, questions/day are up and visits/day are up. Is this because of AnswerSwarm? Probably partially, but I doubt that's the entire story. SimCity was also released recently (along with Tomb Raider, but that tag hasn't seen as much activity), and like any highly anticipated new release, traffic and questions see a bump.– MBraedleyCommented Mar 21, 2013 at 11:04
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2Entirely from a subjective standpoint, there didn't seem to be as much activity as during the Mass Effect promotion, and certainly not as much as Skyrim.– Steve V.Commented Mar 22, 2013 at 3:33
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@SteveV. Probably becuase it is not a new release but an expansion and there was a beta for people that ordered it.– LyrionCommented Mar 22, 2013 at 10:43
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1I expect the statisticians to swoop in here any minute and give us some numbers, but I expect it had a slight effect. I would argue that it was not a competition on the scale of Mass Effect, and understandably got a smaller scale outcome.– EBongoCommented Mar 22, 2013 at 10:51
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I noticed that a lot of the SC2 questions pertained to the single-player campaign, which wasn't available in the beta.– McKayCommented Mar 22, 2013 at 14:37
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1 Answer
This is a yearly view of traffic for Arqade, the area highlighted in pink shows the duration of the contest.
For the duration of the contest (including announcement and fallout), traffic improved by approximately 10k users on average.
Correlation does not imply causation however. The most effective metric would be views on each particular question that fell within the boundaries of the contest, but data.se hasn't updated with that information yet.
However as seen below, it is fair to say it did not dramatically increase traffic as previous contests did. We could speculate that we have already reached our traffic "cap" for this site or other factors tainted this particular game (e.g. the extremely long public beta creating a false launch date, or the general lack of excitement around an expansion versus a full on game). There may not have been enough coverage for the contest as well, such as a ramp up period and sufficient advertising.
For comparison, the full view of our history (I will need some help figuring out all these data points):
- A: Skyrim Contest
- B: ?
- C: Mass Effect 3 contest, followed by League of Legends sponsorship/Contest
- D: Diablo 3 contest
- E: ?
- F: ?
- G: AnswerSwarm
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3B and F were probably Christmas, everyone gets their favorite new AAA game as a gift. For E... I'm going to guess Borderlands 2? Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 1:35
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Not mention that this is in no way an isolated system. AnswerSwarm took place around the time Tomb Raider 2013 was released (although I don't recall many Tomb Raider questions) and Bioshock Infinite was just recently made available (some traffic may be due to hype and people attempting to spoil themselves before playing).– YuukiCommented Mar 28, 2013 at 5:14
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1As a note, the spikes are generally the weekends, which is muted during Christmas because everyone is on vacation. Commented Mar 28, 2013 at 15:04