Written by Stephen Thompson | 26 March 2010

When it comes to gauging how well your website is going it is usual to look at the site statistics. But I always have problems with what it is they actually record. There are things like unique users, page downloads, the number of bits of information that have been viewed, where people came from, what they looked at, how long they stayed, and any number of other things that, frankly, never seem to tell me too much as far as the big picture is concerned. I wonder how much use they are for a magazine like The Specusphere.

Many people look to the number of times their article has been viewed, and that is a reasonable thing to do, but because the zine has so many articles on show in each issue and in the archives, it doesn't tell me how effective we are in getting our message across. Individually, articles are viewed anywhere from a couple of hundred times to well over a thousand for some (and tens of thousands for one in particular). Looking at the bigger picture all I see is a lot of content being read by visitors. I'm not particularly interested in how many people come here because so many of them stay for such a short time or view just one article that the figures become a bit distorted. It's more important that we have a few hundred core readers than ring-ins who dip in and out in flights of fancy. And a trend is more important than a snapshot (the trend is upward, ever upward, in leaps and bounds). And publishers love us, and so do a number of writers. So there are a few ways to gauge success.

What I want to know more than anything, though, is: how effective have we been over the last 4 or 5 years in publicising the genre? Simple numbers from the website stats machine just don't cut it for me. I've cast around for a way of assessing effectivenss for a while now, and then one night, lying in bed fast awake at 3am, I hit on a way.

When we first started The Specusphere we used the term "speculative fiction industry". It came about from my association with Queensland University of Technology and their Creative Industries programme, which I'd had dealings with in a number of ways, not least, at the time, through Fantastic Queensland and a project we were involved in with Creative Advertising students. In fact the name Specusphere came out of my reading of Creative Industries articles about the mediasphere and the blogosphere. I thought: Specusphere, yeah, why not.

Anyway I remember googling "speculative fiction industry" way back then and remember finding about 5 examples of it – all from Green Tentacles http://www.greententacles.com/mailer/. I contacted the editor, Nathan Lilley, and we chatted about things over emails for a while.

So, there I was at 3am thinking, if I googled "speculative fiction industry" at least I should get some idea about how far the term has come and, surely, if the number of hits from Australia has increased (how could it not? Zero beforehand!) then perhaps we at the Specusphere could lay claim to having had some influence in its adoption.

The next morning I did the little search. Well, bugger me blind if there weren't 15,000 links for the term web-wide. Sadly there were only 4 for Australia, and 2 of them were from this site. However, I'm reliably informed that that means nothing, as Australians often use .com rather than .com.au and therefore are seen as "web" sites rather than "oz" sites. And sure enough, a glance through the 15,000 links shows a number of Aussie-based sites using the term.

I'm not vain enough to claim that The Specusphere is responsible for the great boom in the use of the term, but it's pleasing to know that we were perhaps only the second site in the world to use it, and surely that gives us some kudos in some sort of way on some level.

Ultimately, though, it's just another statistic that is as flighty and spectral as all the others. But it makes me feel a bit smug.