And revealed: Who you search for...

The site clocked up an average of 21,167 visits over June, up an incredible 44 per cent on May – and 65 per cent higher than a year ago. We hit a peak last Wednesday with 29,641 visits.

To coincide with the huge hike in visitor numbers, we are moving to a new way of counting the number of people coming to the site.

Using the analytics software developed by web leaders Google, we will now be reporting the number of ‘absolute unique visitors’ coming to the site over the month.

It means the same computer isn’t counted more than once, no matter how many times they come over the month. The figure also excludes visitors to the forums or the blogs – it is a count purely of the number of different people coming to the main site over the month.

In June, Chortle attracted 104,118 absolute unique users – more than the capacity of Wembley Stadium.

About half the visitors come to the site via a search engine. The top ten comedian searches that brought people to Chortle last month were

1. Karen Taylor
2. Bernard Manning
3. Alan Carr
4. Sean Lock
5. Russell Kane
6. Mark Watson
7. Andrew Maxwell
8. Phil Nichol
9. We Are Klang
10. Noel Fielding

We’ll also be publishing this chart every month from now on, as an indication of who’s hot in the world of comedy.

In other statistics provided by the software, people look at an average of 3.2 pages every time they visit, and stay on the site for an average of 2mins 45seconds.

Users of the forum, which attracted a further 11,159 absolute unique users last month, spend on average six-and-a-half minutes looking at nine pages each time.

Published: 1 Jul 2007