How do I know if a beta Stack Exchange site is growing well?

Question

There is a page for every beta SE site in area51 which indicates how healthy that specific site is in its beta phase. While this is a great feature, I think it would be more cool if there was a graph for each indicator too. This will help to know for example whether a site is losing its visitors, or is it gaining new visitors. And how fast is the site growing? Or if the site is having like 2.9 questions per day, what was this number last month or last year? was it 2.5? or was it 3.1 and there are less questions being asked?

Answer 1

Stack Exchange uses Quantcast which collects traffic data about all SE sites and makes them publicly available. See the following URL for the data:

http://www.quantcast.com/stackexchange.com/traffic/sites

Just select the subdomain of the site you're interested in.

As already mentioned, moderators have access to some more statistics, among them is the number of questions and answers.

Answer 2

Knowing how a site is doing historically, and whether it is trending upward or downward is becoming increasingly important as these sites progress through beta. I don't know the prospects for implementing this specific feature request, yet, but making this type of "progress report" information more obtainable is one of our priorities and it is being looked at.

Answer 3

Several sites have their own meta questions for tracking changing statistics on beta sites. This is a community-wiki answer that lists them:

Still in beta:

Arduino
Earth Science
Martial Arts
Productivity
Reverse Engineering
Sustainability

Graduated:

Academia

Caveat:

The thing is, the stats on those linked pages are only crudely indicative. They're crude, but they're all that can be shared publicly. They are not yes/no indicators for graduation. They're crudely indicative, that's all.

Graduation needs a body of expert content, and a community to maintain and expand it. It's much harder to quantify that - there are some stats that can be manually generated by the SE developers, such as the number of high-rep users who visited in the last few weeks, and so on. And there are publicly-visible indicators such as the liveliness of the site meta and its chat. As more and more sites come through Area51 to graduation, we're all learning more about what indicators work, and what don't. I'd speculate that once Area 52 is launched, it will include a new set of indicators that capture that learning.

So, those linked posts are just a broad-brush view of where the site has come from, and is emphatically not a direct measure of how close it is to graduation. And whatever the indicators stand at, the message is still the same: if you want that site to thrive, keep attracting new expert users, keep adding expert content, and keep maintaining the existing content, through sharing, editing, voting, flagging, closing, reopening and deleting wherever appropriate.

Answer 4

There is a set of graphs available to the moderators - they are confidential, but if you speak to your mods they should be able to tell you in general terms whether you are growing, shrinking, stable etc.