March 06 Cyberpunkreview Access Continues Steep Climb

Just a word or two on site access and growth. The month of March has continued a steep increase in site access. Overall, March statistics included:

• 8283 Visits (a “visit” is when when a person actually comes to the site and accesses one or more pages)
• 37,311 Pages viewed by people (and almost another 28,000 by search bots), which means the average person accessed 4.5 pages per visit.
• 308,961 hits (obviously graphics are most of the hits as I have many screencaps per review - also many have linked my images, which, to date I see no reason of blocking)
• Over 1000 of the visits lasted over 15 minutes, with almost 300 lasting over an hour (meaning the visitors read LOTS of movie and game reviews when they visited).

Just for perspective on growth, in February, the first full month of operation, cyberpunkreview had 4305 visits and 20,948 in page views (again, both not counting bot access). Also, Just three days ago (April 1st), cyberpunkreview for the first time had over 400 visits (April 2nd had 388 visits and April 3rd had 399 visits), so it appears that the upward trend is continuing.

International Access
The US accounted for just over 60% of all page views (meaning almost 40% of everyone accessing cyberpunkreview is from outside the US). The next highest countries in order were:

1. Great Britain
2. Australia
3. European Union (I’m guessing many of the smaller European countries are grouped into an “eu” extension, but I really don’t know)
4. Canada
5. Netherlands
6. Greece
7. Germany
8. Sweden
9. China
10. Poland
11. Puerto Rico
12. Croatia
13. Romania
14. Denmark
15. Bulgaria
16. Japan

Top Pages
Many people are accessing the site through the RSS feed. This accounted for my top page with over 4000 page views. In terms of actual pages, they are as follows:

1. Ultraviolet, starring Mila Jovovich - Coming (updated) March 3! - this is true because Google still has cyberpunkreview on the first page for those searching for Mila Jovovich.
2. Cyberpunk Movies by Decade
3. Tetsuo - The Iron Man - many seem to come for the screencaps
4. Ghost in the Shell
5. Ultraviolet
6. What is Cyberpunk?
7. Natural City
8. Armitage III
9. Metropolis
10. Texhnolyze

You’ll notice that most of these were among the first posts on the site. This indicates that the search engines have put these higher in search results than some of the more recent entries.

Game Reviews
One of the really cool things to occur in March was we got more reviewers on the site! Specifically, we got Metatron, Neuromancer and DannyV_El_Acme! All three have contributed wonderful game reviews - Metatron has also contributed reviews for Alien and the awesome William Gibson penned X-Files episode, Kill Switch.
In terms of game reviews, the highest accessed entry was System Shock, followed closely by I have No Mouth and I Must Scream and Deus Ex.

Book Reviews - and still looking for other reviewers!
Again, I’m truly excited about getting more reviewers on the site. I also want to thank Case for giving me some info and pictures on the Gene Generation, and for getting the director to come here and post!

Also, I’m fervently hoping to get some book reviews from David Gentle, Desirina, and others who mentioned an interest in this. I fully understand that doing a book review entails LOTS more work than a movie review, so I anticipate this taking more time. Again, if anyone who has familiarity with the genre and is interested in helping out with reviews, please drop me an email at sfam@cyberpunkreview.com. We’d love to have you join us!

I’m also looking for a resident cyberpunk Art critic. I’ve mentioned this once or twice to Budo (username ETM), who did my most awesome header, but thusfar he hasn’t bitten down. Hopefully I get someone to take this on though. I do want someone with artistic talent to do this (or someone with an art history background) - when I look at most of these, I find myself loving all of them. But perhaps art critique really can’t use a star rating system - this is OK too.

The Meatspace
The Meatspace discussion area is still growing. Just two days ago, we had 10 people on at once! There’s some pretty cool topics under way, including a list of all cyberpunk movies, so check it out if you haven’t already.

Future Plans
I’m starting to slow down a bit in my movie reviews. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up with one a day. In part this is due to the increased amount of time I spend on my reviews. If you go to some of the earlier ones, many are lots shorter with less screencaps. At some point I intend to go back and beef some of these up (like Dark City, for instance). I find screencaps and cyberpunk musings essential for good movie reviews, and will probably continue this.

Mangas and Graphic Novels: Also, I intend to start reviewing some of the bigger cyberpunk mangas and graphic novels. I’m still thinking of the best way to review these, but I’ve already decided that the reviews will involve captures of the artwork.

More Navigation Pointers: Because the number of movies has increased substantially, the decades page is becoming a bit less useful. I intend to build a tree structure of all my navigation pages and link them within the key nav pages. So, from the Movies by Decade page, you’ll be able to get to the “Movies by Star Rating” page and the cyberpunk themes pages.