How COVID-19 impacted to Scuola Filosofica (Philosophical School – www.scuolafilosofica.com) – Philosophical Blog? Before giving you the data, the state of normalcy of SF was 1500/2000 unique visitors per day with peaks in the middle of the week (Monday-Wednesday and Sunday) and down on Friday and Saturday (with a 30/40% of decrease). SF has more than 10 years of existence, 35 authors, +1150 web pages, 10 technicians, and it is active in the main social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin – through the Team) but the visitors are heavily based on google researchers (95% of all the traffic). So, above is a daily graph of the last 2 months and a half (26 Jan – Today). It must be said that SF knew a constant increase of its unique visitors since its inception. It increased every year steadily and, sometimes, with impressive jumps ahead as in the last year (300.000 unique visitors). However, along with COVID-19 SF boomed, even though this boom has to be coupled with the speed-up technical arrangement due to the excess of average time of page generation (more that 7 seconds). Interestingly, now that the page generation time felt to slightly less than a second (0,85%) the number of bounces (one page view) jumped from 30% to 80% but the average time of visit is now to 3′ minutes and a half.
As you can see, the amount of visitors is steadily increased along with the government health measures. Interestingly, the first school enclosure meant a decrease of the visitors but after the second week and especially the third week (with the declaration of Italy as “Red Zone Country) we saw an increasing number of visitors (2000) and we arrived yesterday to (2750). It is true, we made a speed up and then a part of the visitors must be explained through it. But it is still a remarkable increasing in numbers. Interestingly, the ordinary traffic from social media is not increased and, instead, is decreased (from almost 120 visualization to 50). Probably, this is because people are not using social in a way consistent with the content promoted by SF but they found us through a difference source. An exception is the YouTube channel that is going steadly up (even though still limited to few visualizations if we compare them to the blog visits). Interestingly, however, hour publisher didn’t register any significant change in books selling.
Another interesting data – not reported in the graph – is that almost 60% of all the visitors came from North of Italy: 25% Lombardy, 10% Piemonte, 10% Liguria, and almost 10% all the other north regions combined (and I am excluding Emilia Romagna with its steadily 6%). This is an interesting and remarkable fact because we have authors from all over Italy and they are not concentrated in the north and the technical hard core of the blog is indeed based in Sardinia – which is rated as 2% (!) of all the entries. These data for regions are collected since the speed-up but I think it is a realistic feature of the data entries. Finally, it must be said that there are visitors from all over the world with US as first country outside Italy – but still Italy makes almost 95% of all the data!
The COVID-19 impacted so much to SF that we had to reform it, improve it and adapt to the new level of visitors (unique or not). Then, it is reasonable to state that the number of sheer readers is really increased and this is the clear proof of it. So, after all, many people are really spending their time in educational activities trying to maximizing their education.
Giangiuseppe Pili
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