Here it is again…the post no one but I and a few other people in the known universe care about…the web stats post! Get all the numeric goodness below the fold!

Percent change in ( ) is from February.  Percent change in [ ] is from March 2008.

Visits: 17,416 (43.3%) [255.1%]
Page Views: 32,525 (53.7%) [295.3%]
Absolute Unique Visitors: 14,316 (39.6%) [300.8%]

This translates into:

Visits/day: 561.8 (29.5%) [255.1%]
Page Views/day: 1049.2 (38.5%) [295.3]
AUV/day: 461.8 (26.1%) [300.8%]

Of course, the stats per day is probably the most accurate given that March had 3 more days than February.  Even so, the blog still saw pretty good growth and I believe is over 500 visits per day and 1000 Page Views per day for the first time.  It’s also up to 1.87 page views per visit, which is the highest I’ve seen in a while, meaning that people are coming and looking around instead of reading one post and then leaving.

For the first quarter of 2009, I’m already at 43,000 visits and nearly 77,000 page views.  At this rate, after April, I’ll virtually certainly pass 50,000 visits on the year and have a good shot at passing 100,000 page views.  This brings up the possibility that, if my blog’s traffic continues to grow through the year, there is a chance of 250,000 visits and 500,000 page views this calendar year.

Also, just as with last month, I’m nearly tripling the traffic for the same month last year.

The 5 busiest days in March (in visits):

1. March 9 (925)
2. March 8 (740)
3. March 31 (711)
4. March 29 (691)
5. March 30 (649)

These constitute the 5 highest traffic days of the entire year (and March had a total of 7 of the top 10 thus far).

Top 5 visited posts (in page views):

1. Spring 2009 Anime Preview (2,329)
2. Top 10 Anime of 2008 (2,154)
3. Winter 2009 Anime Preview (1,386)
4. Special A – Episode 13 (1,318)
5. CLANNAD: After Story – Episode 21 (1,111)

And the Special A mystery continues.  I don’t think I’ve made a post about this, but my blog has gotten inundated by seemingly non-spammy comments about Special A over the past few weeks, and it appears it’s not just comments but real hits as well, with the top episode summary post being a Special A episode and the Special A category page even beating out CLANNAD’s, which is nearly unimaginable to me.

Apparently people are finding my blog (and that post specifically) by searching for “special a class episode,” as that post is the 5th listing on the Yahoo! search results page. It also seems to make sense that most of these visitors are from the Philippines as it appears that the show started airing there recently.  I just found it really odd how a show that aired in Japan nearly a year ago suddenly had hordes of people commenting on it and visiting those episode pages.

In any case…

In March, there were visits from 126 countries, which is actually a drop of about 9 countries since February, despite the increased traffic.  However 20 nations gave me at least 100 visits and 69 gave me at least 10 visits (both an increase over last month).  This is also the first month I can recall Canada not being the nation giving me the 2nd most visits, being supplanted by the Philippines and their Special A mania.  For the fourth straight month, every US state has given me a visit, with now 17 states giving me at least 100 visits, also ahead of last month.

The erosion of Firefox as the browser of choice by visitors continues, though it still used by a majority, with 53.3% using it.  35.5% of visitors use some version of Internet Explorer while 4.1% use Safari, and 3.2% use each Opera and Chrome.  A total 89.8% of Firefox users are using some version of Firefox 3, which is essentially same as last month.  Out of IE users, 3.3% are using the newly released IE8, 67.2% are using IE7, while 29.5% are still using the doom of humanity IE6, which is actually a substantial increase over last month (maybe everyone still uses IE6 in the Philippines?)