Summer is usually the peak season for traffic to fishing websites, and GoFISHn is no exception. In June, GoFISHn saw almost 234,000 visits from 177,000 unique visitors, according to Google Analytics. Those numbers are a 3.5x improvement over the same month last year. GoFISHn's best day last in June saw 12,900 visits, which is more than 4x our best day in June 2010.
Where did all that traffic come from? Google was our top referrer, and Facebook second, which is no surprise. GoFISHn was built with Google in mind, and our 170,000 fan Facebook page drives lots of traffic. But the third biggest source of traffic is direct -- folks who type in the GoFISHn url or bookmark the site. That number reached 27,000 in June and marks a 5x increase over last year. Clearly the GoFISHn brand is taking hold. All told, GoFISHn saw traffic from 1,371 "all sources and mediums" last month. Here's the breakdown for the top seven sources (m.facebook.com is Facebook on a mobile device.)
GoFISHn also reached some additional important milestones. The GoFISHn blog on GoFISHn crossed the 100,000 "likes" threshold, and the GoFISHn Score program had its first big winner, Captain Paul Peluso, whose great profile on GoFISHn reached 5,000 likes, and he won a free trip with his choice of GoFISHn's big list of guides. (That's Paul in picture at the top of the post. No wonder he is smiling!)
What does GoFISHn's success to date tell us? First off, our big bet on user-generated content is on the money. Every day members post pictures, video and fishing reports -- sometimes their own pictures and reports and sometimes content they found online.
To date, we've had nearly 11,000 posts. The content is fantastically varied and unpredictable, which is what readers clearly love. To get an idea of the all-time most popular posts on GoFISHn, click here. An everyday fishing report from a Florida skipper, an Alaska guide, or a Wyoming fly guide with a talent for video, can see hundreds of pageviews and dozens of "likes" in hours, and stories and pictures about amazing fish, like a record blue cat, can explode with thousands of pageviews in hours.
The variety only starts there. Who knew that crime stories, like abalone poaching, would be such big hits? Humor is another category where GoFISHn has found a deep well of great material, like this crazy Asia carp stunt, and readers are also eager to take in anything from the natural science perspective, like the latest on cookie cutter sharks or the gender-bending behavior of wrasse, or spectacular nature photography and video, like this BBC video of a bald eagle taking a salmon. The sensational, which often seems to come from Australia for some reason, is always a sure bet, like this amazing picture of a saltwater croc in Australia grappling with a sea turtle or another croc taking a bite out of a tough Aussie dentist angler.
In other words, there is a huge abundance of highly entertaining, original fishing content published on the Web every day, and GoFISHn members do a great job of finding it for everyone to enjoy. Fishing magazines and cable channels are great fun, but their professional content model does not compete with the true-life experiences and digitally captured imagery that countless anglers post everyday. GoFISHn is well on the way to becoming the destination of choice for all that fishing media.
I will be at ICAST in Las Vegas along with Brian McClintock. Drop me a note (Ned@gosportn.com) if you'd like to learn more. -Ned Desmond
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