Phil Gyford

It’s been more than four years since I launched Byliner and for months I’ve been meaning to look at how sign-up rates had changed. The site languished for a long time, and for a while I was telling myself I’d put the site out of its misery if there wasn’t a single new registration in a calendar month. But that never quite happened.

So here’s a graph of the number of new registrations per month. There are now 870 registered users, and the rate of new users joining seems pretty healthy over the last year or so. Not bad for a site that takes maybe 15 minutes a week to run.

The site currently lists 76,210 stories written by 6,831 writers (although there are a few duplicates and errors). Ideally there would be many better ways to discover some of these writers. There’s a lot that could be done with the site, but it’s a matter of weighing up the time it would take and the overall benefit. As always.

Here’s the top twenty terms people have searched for to arrive at the site (all linking to Google, although that’s not necessarily where the searching visitors came from):

1. ana marie cox
2. victoria murphy
3. dan briody
4. felicity lawrence
5. victoria murphy forbes
6. caitlin moran
7. wendell steavenson
8. captain moonlight
9. emily yoffe
10. paul tolme
11. hamza hendawi
12. tabitha soren
13. seema kalia
14. strawberry saroyan
15. tanya gold
16. the unforbidden is compulsory
17. anna marie cox
18. julie burchill
19. pat butcher
20. anatole kaletsky