Someone (possibly Mark Twain) once said:
There are lies, damn lies and statistics
meaning, I suppose, that stats don’t tell the whole story, and that is certainly true.
However, for the first time in a long while I checked the stats for my various websites last week and was interested, and indeed quite impressed, by what I found.
The site with the most page views now is my photographic website, Photo Dharma, which, in less than a week, had nearly 32,000 page views. The site has over 7,500 photographs on it by now, in three different sizes, including high-definition.
As the stats (which come direct from the Internet Service Provider) are limited in their scope I cannot tell how many photographs were actually viewed, but there were over 140,000 hits, and most of those would indeed be photographs.
My texts website, Ancient Buddhist Texts, is still the most important to me, and although it has less page views than Photo Dharma, quite possibly it has more influence, as this provides a direct study of the Buddhist teachings. There are roughly 100 documents in up to 6 different formats: htm, pdf, flipbook, epub, mobi & mp3.
Last week there were more than 20,000 page views and anyone reading a page might be there for quite some time. The most popular visit is to the Audio Page, where there are more 60 hours of readings embedded.
The website for my teacher Godwin Samararatne is showing less page reads than I expected, but we have not been able to add to the site for some time now, and that may account for it. The site has six complete books, all of which have been published in hard copy, and a number translated into different languages. There are also 35 audio talks, besides shorter pieces and photographs.
Still if people are viewing over 3,000 pages a week it is not bad, and there is now a very popular blog run by some Friends of Godwin, which draws on our website, and provides selected readings on an almost daily basis.
Last year I spent much of the Rains Retreat setting up a new website to publish the Sri Lankan Buddha Jayanti Tripitaka Series in around 16,000 image files.
Given that the language is Pali throughout, and the script is Sinhala, I think it shows a reasonable amount of visitor interest. We do plan to add to the commentaries and other materials to the site at some point, but I have to wait on others to do the necessary page scanning.
My YouTube Channel, Dharma Films, which has around 70 videos I have made and many playlists for Buddhist Films as well is also doing quite well, with over 1,500 subscribers and over 300,000 views.
