Wow. Thanks so much to everyone who participated – about 50% of readers who saw the post donated their time to fill out the survey, and I can’t say how much I appreciated it. Now, let’s get our learn on!
First, a special mention to Ichiban Moto, who had the closest guess to the number of posts published on Bike-urious in 2015. The correct answer? 1,904 posts. He guessed 1,873, which means I’m sending him a Bike-urious t-shirt. Well done.
For those of you that are interested, here’s some stats on the average reader:
The average reader is a 45-54 year old male who’s (obviously) into motorcycles and cars. In the last year Bike-urious had visitors from 212 countries, though the majority (62%) of viewers live in the US. Within the US, the largest percentage of viewers (16%) came from California.
Even including readers who said they didn’t own a motorcycle, the average reader has 5.11 bikes, but that’s inflated thanks to readers who had a whole bunch of bikes. The median was 3, and I will say that the largest collection I heard about in the garage was one reader with 65+ bikes. Many of you have a problem that I’d like to have…you’ve lost track of exactly how many motorcycles you own! As you might imagine, there were lots of impressive garages, but I have to give a special shoutout to someone who is apparently quite dedicated to BMW, with a garage consisting of a R27, R50, R60, R80GS, R100GS, R90S, R90/6, R1200C, R1100S, R1150GS, R1200GS, R1200GSA, F800GS, HP2 Enduro, HP2 Megamoto, and a K75 bobber. That answer made me laugh – I look forward to visiting your BMW museum when you open it!
Feedback for the future:
I loved hearing what y’all have to think about the site and how it can get better. The majority of respondents said something along the lines of ‘keep doing what you’re doing’, which is very much appreciated. A few people had some suggestions I think are worth incorporating, so I’ll share them here.
– Add dates to posts.
This makes plenty of sense. Especially if you click a ‘related post’, you could end up on a bike that was featured 2 years ago, which can be confusing. So, on the home page and in each post, I’ve added the date the post was published (along with the name of the author as new contributors have joined the team!)
Home page example (what I’ve added is surrounded in red):
Post example (what I’ve added is surrounded in red):
– How to submit bikes/contact me.
Found a bike that you think is worth featuring or just want to contact me for any reason? Email abhi@bike-urious.com.
– Timing of emails versus posts.
It seems there’s a little bit of confusion regarding when the email goes out with regards to the posts that are published. The email goes out every morning at 4am PST, and it includes any new posts that appeared on the site since the previous email. A couple of people were hoping for emails that would go out at the same time posts are published to minimize the wait. If I had one post a day, that’d work fine, but I strongly suspect think you want 1,900+ emails a year flooding your inbox! So for now, you’ll have to check the site for the most recent post, or wait for the summary email in the morning.
– Confusion about how to comment.
Especially with some of the “Guess That Bike” features, a lot of readers were sending me emails en lieu of leaving a comment on the site. A few respondents said they were confused about how to comment…so here’s how you do it! Bike-urious uses a commenting platform called Disqus. Scroll to the bottom to find the comments, then click int the “Join the discussion…” box to leave a comment. You’ll either need to login with Disqus/Facebook/Twitter/Google or you can leave a comment as a guest.
– More 70s bikes/trikes/dirt bikes/newer bikes/less Harleys/more Harleys/bikes in general/posts about riders/etc
As you’d expect, there were conflicting opinions on different bikes for the future. I’ll probably stay relatively constant with what I feature, but now we’ve got more contributors with different tastes! In addition,
The survey was anonymous, so I couldn’t respond to certain specific questions. If you’ve got further questions or I didn’t address something you were hoping to hear about, just drop me a line: abhi@bike-urious.com!
Best,
-a