The increasing popularity of Islam.SE

Question

TL;DR:

1. Islam.SE's traffic is high and growing rapidly. We might even overtake Christianity.SE in the near future.

2. We can expect a large Ramadan spike in traffic.

3. Unlike Christianity.SE, most of Islam.SE's traffic comes from outside the US.

4. Our per-day rate of questions is higher than at most points throughout Islam.SE history, and increasing (a key indicator of when a site is ready to graduate).

Over time

Summary: Traffic to Islam.SE has is growing at a rapidly increasing rate. We can expect a big spike during the upcoming Ramadan.

This plot was generated from the Site Analytics data, but it's also accessible from QuantCast. It plots the site's traffic (measured in three ways), along with a linear regression and a 20-day moving average:

Clearly there is a massive spike surrounding Ramadan. But we also see that the site's popularity is increasing at rate that is higher than we would expect from past performance.

Vs. Christianity.SE

Summary: Islam.SE is currently around 27% less popular than Christianity.SE, but we have nearly caught up and we may overtake Christianity.SE. We have comparable "staying power" to Christianity.SE, i.e., return visits to the site occur at the roughly the same rates. Most of Islam.SE's traffic comes from outside the US.

The number of uniques during the week 22-28 April given by QuantCast is given below:

                Islam.SE   Christianity.SE   Judaism.SE

US                 20226             89442        17347
Rest of World      85819             45486         8731

Total             106045            134928        26078
vs. Islam.SE                        (+27%)       (-75%)

I took week-long traffic samples from QuantCast to compare both Islam.SE and Christianity.SE. I took samples from time periods just before Ramadan.

                             Islam.SE                                    Christianity.SE          
                     uniques        visits    stay                      uniques         visits  stay

2013  May 28-Jun 3    16597          19270    1.16      May 29-Jun 4     27001           32234  1.19
2014  May 21-May 27   39650 (+139%)  43886    1.11      May 23-May 29    77808 (+218%)   85798  1.00
2015  May 10-May 16   64910 (+64%)   71806    1.11      May 8-May 14    127529 (+49%)   142079  1.11
2016  Apr 27-May 3    69137 (+7%)    76521    1.11      Apr 27-May 3    121571 (-5%)    135172  1.11
2017  Apr 15-Apr 21  110562 (+60%)  122047    1.10      Apr 16-Apr 22   161370 (+33%)   178509  1.11

Where stay := uniques / visits is intended to measure the "staying power" of the site, i.e., how many uniques keep participating.

Questions per day

Summary: While we're not consistently averaging 10+ questions a day, our per-day rate of questions is (a) higher than at most points throughout Islam.SE history, and (b) increasing.

Updating goldPseudo's answer to At what point will Islam.se grow out of the beta stage?: consistently averaging 10 or more questions a day? Here's the weekly number of questions vs. the 70-questions-per-week threshold:

Here's the same data points, but with a linear regression and 20-week moving average:

---

Also see:

• The number of questions/answers and upvotes/downvotes per day for statistics in relation to voting

• Which country has the most reputation? for geographical statistics (which should be interpreted carefully)

Answer 1

As someone who helped get mechanics.SE out of Beta, I can say that it helps to put all of the Area 51 metrics in the "Excellent" category.

Once those metrics were green, the SE team sat up and took notice. They felt that there wasn't enough of a "middle-class" in the Mechanics community, so we had to spend a few more months in Beta to create that middle-class, making sure that all users were aware of the importance of voting.

Based on the present metrics, the site is lacking in a few areas:

• Questions per day, which stands at around 7 at present. We need to be at 10 QPD. For Mechanics.SE, I set up a questions sandbox where I could unload questions that were floating around in my head but could not be asked immediately
• Get a greater percentage of questions "answered". This can be done through:
  • closing poor questions. I led the purge on Mechanics.SE with the support of a few other avid users
  • answering unanswered questions that can be answered
  • upvoting answers on questions that have no upvoted answers

• Voting. Like it or not, it's the lifeblood of any SE site, and I'm sure there are plenty of good answers that deserve to be voted on.

  (Isn't it amazing what people can do for arbitrary Internet points?)