How Much of WC's Traffic Is from Real People?
Here’s a quick look at our traffic over the last 30 days, as measured by our CDN:
520,940 unique visitors
4,750,000 total requests (similar to pageviews, but higher since each page can trigger multiple requests)
Now compare that to what our Matomo analytics—designed to track human visitors only—shows:
6,223 unique visitors
61,746 pageviews
That’s a massive difference.
This is why some websites seem to have inflated traffic stats—many don't filter out bots. As you can see, bot traffic overwhelms real human visits. This becomes especially relevant when sites sell ads based on “hits” or pageviews. If you were paying for ads, wouldn’t you want to make sure real people were seeing them?
On the forum index page, you'll notice a count of registered users and guests online. The guest count doesn’t include bots, which are listed separately—those are the legitimate crawlers from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Facebook, and other reputable search engines. Our CDN filters out the rest before they even hit the server, which helps keep the site fast.
I’m well aware that 99% of the traffic on the internet is garbage—like many of my own posts—and I’ve taken steps to filter it out.
We currently don’t have any paid advertisers. The ads you see are placeholders I’m using to measure actual human views and clicks. Unlike many sites, I make sure only human interactions are counted.
Based on industry averages, we now generate enough legitimate traffic to offer real value to advertisers. Interestingly, our simple text ads are outperforming flashy clickbait graphics. I think it’s because most of us have trained ourselves to ignore banner ads, while a clear, concise text ad can still catch the eye and get a genuine click.
Just my take—but the numbers seem to back it up.
But let’s be honest—advertisers aren’t going to come knocking on our door. Getting them on board will take some old-school effort… like actually picking up the phone and talking to someone, instead of just using it to scroll through TikTok.
That’s not my strength. I’m an engineer, not a salesperson—and let’s just say my people skills could probably clear a room, or at least get a phone call ended pretty fast.
Any suggestions?