The average American frequent flyer/points and miles enthusiast.

For example Swedish frequent flyer/points and miles enthusiasts like the sites in our own language and the other sites in Norwegian and Danish that we can follow if we want to.

Well sure, but I'd argue that the average points and miles enthusiast IS American.

Seriously, though, if those language-specific sites fill a niche then good for them! ^

40% of our contributors are from outside the US.

And I'd argue that those who are above average might well enjoy sites in their own languages.

But what about contributions? Or readers? I'm betting the numbers skew quite differently there.

Lies, damn lies and statistics. :-:

What is puzzling is the crazy expansion of the milepoint/bonusfeber franchise into minor EU markets where they are at best #2 or 3. In the meantime they are not active (yet) in the big travel markets Germany and UK. I suppose setting up a new site and filling it with seed content by volunteers is pretty easy and inexpensive

True, but from what I can see most of our contributors have English as their native language and probably 99% are comfortable writing in English.

Those from non-English speaking nations I am most familiar with are Israelis and Italians and only a tiny percentage of these are fluent enough in English to be able to use FT.

Germany has Vielfliegertreff and Vielfliegerforum. The UK already has this fine airline/travel/anything-to-do-with-UK forum.

Milepoint was set up despite the presence of Flyertalk. @:-)

I suspect the language/market/'node' selections are driven by the presence of native-speaking volunteers/partners.

AFAIK there is no participation, equity or otherwise, by MP in VFT and VFF.

That's what I meant. Germany already has VFT and VFF, therefore it's possible MP has not attempted to set up a node despite the size of potential audience.

August data:

View Screen Capture

View Screen Capture

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/mil...c=uv&months=12

These graphs are becoming quite intruiging. The overall shapes are not dissimilar, including the approximate tripling of unique visitors since April 2014. What's causing that? Web use hasn't tripled in the last four to six months, surely - so is this an artefact caused by some increasing deficit in counting methods (eg more people blocking counting cookies)?

compete.com is probably not the best metric as it derives traffic from various sources and uses/displays US data only. That said its the only metric we have and data is available all the way back till the start of MP. @:-)

compete.com does not measure actual visitors the way Google Analytics does. Their panel [1] is "combining the online behaviors of millions consumers" and based on the sites they visit they "... use algorithms and advanced analytics techniques to make projections of US Internet activity to report on the number of individual people visiting a site."

So they do not know the exact traffic on milepoint or flyertalk. They are extrapolating a guess as to the total traffic on those sites. In fact, many sites I've seen on there, where I can compare their numbers with actual numbers are usually not even close. The recent uptick in reported visitors probably has to do with a change in the people on their panel rather than a sharp change in visitors to either site.

[1] https://www.compete.com/about-compete/our-data/