BTB By The Numbers: 2013 User Stats - Recognizing Significant Contributions To BTB

Every six months or so, we take a look back at some of our key user stats here on Blogging The Boys in an effort to recognize those community members who have made significant contributions to making BTB what it is today: a vibrant and growing community.

BTB is more than just the sum of the front page writers, much more. While many of us may have stumbled on BTB via an article on the front page, we kept coming back and eventually signed up because of the quality of our community here. Different people contribute in different ways to the community. Many add comments, often on an almost daily basis. Some of you add Fanshots or even FanPosts. And each day, each of us adds a little more to the community. So this is where we say thank YOU, you the reader, you the commenter, you the contributor.

A little further below, we break down the BTB stats from 2013 to honor the most prolific BTB members, both in terms of quantity and quality, and recognize them for their contributions. Here's what our topline stats for 2013 look like:

• Nine different front page writers worked tirelessly to bring you a record haul of 2,214 front page posts in 2013, a little over four hundred more articles than in the previous two years ('12: 1,804, '11: 1,794) and more than twice as much as in the two years before that ('10: 1,081, '09: 853). For a football blog that covers only sixteen regular season games (next year we'll start covering the playoffs for the Cowboys, I swear!), knocking out an average of six articles per day, 365 days per year, is an awesome job. And just like Sum 41, I like to think that effort was "All Killer, No Filler", most of the time anyway. At the very least though, I think we've kept you well entertained.
• 345 BTB members wrote a combined 1,153 FanPosts last year. That's slighty down from the 1,336 last year, but what's the community to do if we keep promoting the most prolific FanPosters to the front page?
• 204 BTB members published a total of 1,028 Fanshots in 2013, down significantly from last year (1,539 Fanshots from 315 members), The Fanshots have clearly suffered from the new site design implemented in September 2012, but the BTB fanshots remain one of the strongest across all of SB Nation regardless.

As a team of writers here on BTB, we take great pride in what we do here day in and day out to bring you the best non-accredited Cowboys coverage you can find.

If you've been with us for a while, you probably don't have to read the byline on most posts to quickly realize which of the nine writers on the BTB masthead wrote the story you are reading. Some of us like stats more than others, some like cheerleaders more than others, some like to be a little more critical than others, some like the draft more than others and some dislike the mainstream media more than others. We trust that those likes and dislikes, in sum, have resulted in quality coverage for you.

Here are our numbers for 2013 and how they compare to the previous two years:

As you would expect, there is of course a seasonality here on BTB that is in line with the way the football season is structured:

The table above shows the number of frontpage posts per month as well as the number of comments generated by those posts. In terms of posts, we have our peaks in the run-up to the draft in April and of course during the season, while it's a little harder to come up with relevant topics in the offseason. We see a similar pattern with the number of comments per day, although those numbers are of course influenced by the open threads we have going during those peak periods.

The table below lists the 15 top contributors in the FanPost section. The tables are sorted by number of FanPosts in 2013, by the number of recommendations (rec's) received and by the number of comments generated by the FanPost and the ensuing discussion.

We are very proud of the fact that all our front page writers here on BTB have been recruited from the BTB community, and this year was no exception, as we added two more prolific former FanPoster to the masthead: Joey Ickes and Dawn Macelli. We are also very proud to be one of the very few SB Nation blogs to have a woman on our writing staff. Who knows, maybe next we'll recruit a foreign writer? I hear there's a strong football fan base in Germany for example...

You may have come to take the FanPosts for granted here on BTB, but don't do that. Writing a FanPost - and a well-received one at that - is a lot of work, so if you see one you like, give it a rec'. And don't be stingy with those rec's. They are the most gratifying thing for most authors because they show a special appreciation for the work the author has put into his/her FanPost. And after a while, they become addictive, so if you want to see more from a given FanPoster, rec' him or her and watch how they come back again and again for those rec's.

In addition to the volume metrics above, we'll next look at a couple efficiency metrics and rank contributors by RpFPs (Recommendations per FanPost) and CpFPs (Comments per FanPost). Here's a look at the BTB top dogs in terms of recommendations and comments per post (min. six posts to qualify). You'll find most of the perennial BTB favorites on one of these lists.

After record levels of Fanshots in 2012, we've seen the numbers slow down in 2013. But the demise of the Fanshot is greatly exaggerated: while the Fanshots have moved down the front page and are therfore not getting as much attention as they did previously, we've seen activity pick up again as we've gotten used to the new format and as some of the issues with the Fanshot section have been fixed.

Tip of the hat to all of you who posted Fanshots, the top 15 are below.

41 different bloggers made at least one of the FanPost or Fanshot tables above, but many, many more contributed to the blog this year. And if your name's not on any of the lists above, but you want to see your name up in the bright BTB lights, then simply post more stuff, more often!

Until then, thank you all for your great contributions.