Summer is here! And, wow, we can really feel it in central Europe.
I decided to start doing quarterly updates with the newsletter statistics and future plans starting now! I hope that you will enjoy reading this report as much as I enjoyed making it.
Email Subscribers
We ended this quarter with 978 email subscribers (I was really hoping to reach 1k subscribers for this update, but you can’t always get what you want). Here is how the number of subscribers changed since the beginning of the newsletter:
Weekly Robotics started this quarter with 664 email subscribers, meaning that we observed a 47% growth in subscribers in the past 3 months. I hope we can keep up this rate of growth for the foreseeable future.
Website Traffic
One of the goals I set for the Weekly Robotics was to make every issue of the newsletter available online and easily accessible to everyone, even if they are not subscribed via email. In some weeks I saw quite a big spikes in the number of users visiting the site, even though I kept using the same channels for sharing the information about the new issues and we didn’t run any ad campaigns just yet.
According to Google Analytics we had 6.8k users and 9.3k sessions in the last quarter, increasing the traffic by 125% compared to the last quarter.
Time Spent on the Newsletter
This quarter I started logging time spent on the Newsletter. This includes all the research for every issue, development of tools, writing reports etc. Basically I logged every minute spent on the work related to the newsletter and the total time I spent these months came to 80:49:36 and there was only one week in which I spent under 4 hours working on Weekly Robotics:
Upgrades and future plans
There are 3 things we improved in the quarter and a day:
- Introducing the announcement section in WR #32 (the last day of Q1!)
- Adding header image starting with WR #37 (5th of May)
- Creating Awesome Weekly Robotics database and hosting it on WR and GitHub (9th of June)
The plan for Q3 2019
There is a single goal for me for Q3: to automate the newsletter workflow and look into self-hosted email delivery platform.
Long Term Goals
Here are some of the long term goals that I’m hoping to achieve this calendar year with Weekly Robotics:
- Website redesign - especially looking into the structure of the website menu and maybe adding a landing page (while keeping the newsletter archive intact)
- Finding the first sponsor/contributor for the newsletter
- Starting a discussion group - either some kind of forum or a Slack channel
Thanks a lot for being part of Weekly Robotics. I hope that you continue enjoying this newsletter! If you have any thoughts on this report don’t hesitate to reach out.
Mat