Conventions?

Drama and long outages.

That is incredibly interesting, I for one would love to find out why such spikes happen.

bots?

http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/chuc.....s_vs_boobs.jpg

It's because people think it's cool to be a furry one day, then regret their decision when it doesn't fit in with their clique. Or they suddenly start to hate animals

^Probably this.

The rise in Inkbunny traffic during the first dip suggests that the dip was a major outage.

Feb 14th = Valentines day [Might be a reason]

Here's FA vs. Wy
http://s7.postimg.org/vr2avddcb/fa_wy.png

It was kind of a bitch to get, too. For some reason I could only do Wy -> FA, not FA -> Wy. And even then half the time it'd go "feh, no data."

If you want to do some more, http://new.similarweb.com/

Changing sites is a lot of work and it's a gamble in whether anyone else will follow. It's simply safer to stay on FA and make a back up account on the other sites. The other sites are noticeably less populated because everyone forked between the three alternatives if they cared to leave at all. It will take a lot to change that effect anytime drama happens.

I have an account on all of them and regularly post. out of the three, Weasyl is the most boring with posts getting barley any traffic, let alone comments. InkBunny gets some traffic, and does tend to have nice comments when they came, but it's very selective. SoFurry is pretty OK in traffic but still way less then FA.

My most popular post on FA stands at about 253 favs, 10 comments, and 1098 views.
That same post on Weasyl: 7 favs, 1 comment, and 74 views.
InkBunny: 56 favs, 1 comment, and 205 views.
SoFurry: 78 faves, 6 comments 602 views.

That same post is also my most faved post on IB. I can't get states for Sofurry, and on Weasyl, none of my pics have gotten past 9 faves.

I will also add that I have been on SF for the same length as I've been on FA(about 3 years). I've been on Inkbunny about 2 years, and I've only started posting to Weasyl since February.

What did you use for the data on this anyway? It's very interesting! (Also run one with Weasyl already!)

Likely http://new.similarweb.com/
When I went looking, that's the one I found that would let me compare without having to sign up. The UI is identical, so I'm pretty sure that was it.

Since it has a 3 site limit, why not render another one with just FA and Weasyl, and then superimpose that graph on this one? Assuming FA has the max values across the board, the graphs should line up perfectly.

Weasyl:
http://s7.postimg.org/vr2avddcb/fa_wy.png

Dec 1-8 it rose 50%Dec 8-15 traffic doubled (2013).
Jan. 12-19 traffic rose 250%, then up to this day dropped almost 200%. lol


Weasyl is pretty close to where Inkbunny is on the chart, but still under (but close).

http://imgur.com/jmeKhGi

what time zone is that set to?

Could be scrapers inflating the numbers. I get the feeling SoFurry's dev surge has obfuscated the actual content from a scraper standpoint. FA is where you go to scrape pictures systematically. And if you're satisfied with your operation you call it off.

Unless FA has 10 times the visitors of SF on specific months...

o3o; Regardless, this is very interesting, and I thank you for posting it!

My guess is holiday commissions, art, gift art

One whole month of roughly three times as much traffic as usual. Hmmm... DDOS attacks? Mistakes slipped into a code updates that would cause unnecessary data? (simple example: "send this data three times to client instead of once, but only use one instance")

I do wonder how much this data is being influenced by sites like Tumblr. I do see artists migrate there.

these do, I think, kind of fit with FA's large outage and the drama-spire that came from project Pheonix

Could be DDOS attacks.

Open/closed registration maybe?

The big break in the winter is probably due to the long outage. You'll need more data to see get a big picture.

Where does this site even get its data?

I'm more interested to see Weasyl's place in the stats than Sofurry's, assuming you're using non-public tools to do this.

Is it when you post stuff, people view your page?

It corresponds to when Rarakie is taking commissions, and when she's not taking commissions.

Now I want to see weasyl, Pixiv and sofurry compared... that would be great to know which one is gaining traction fastest.

Whooo metrics!

there's nothing to do but work and fap in February? I dunno

Depending on which site you used, their estimates can vary wildly over time from the actual metrics. They don't get real data from the sites they report on and their methods are mostly guessing. Back in the day, one of those sites had a margin of error greater than 200% for a site I was involved with that was getting almost 1M-hits/wk at the time.