Overland Forum Stats 2013

How many overland and vehicle forums are you registered on? Got a favourite?  Do you create threads and reply to posts?  Or do you simply lurk scanning the huge amounts of content seeking out that fresh piece of information that glues your thoughts together?

In February 2012, I spent time researching the most popular overland and vehicle based forums currently active on the internet.  I recorded the names of the forums, along with the membership, total threads and posts and even the Alexa internet popularity rank. You can read more via: Internet Forums - Love 'em or Hate 'em.

It's now February 2013 and here are the latest statistics on those forums...

Registered Users
The registered users are simply that.  This does not represent the active members on the site.  Essentially the more registered users, the more content there is to read.  Only the forum 'ih8mud' publishes active membership count.

Overland Forums - Registered Users 2013

Registered User Growth
This is the big one... which forums had the biggest growth of registered users over the last year? The winner: 'Expedition Portal'. The average growth throughout 2012 was 16% with the Expedition Portal achieving a huge 51% growth in registered users in a single year.
The only recorded decline in registered users was 'ih8mud' which I interpret as the administrators cleaning up the user base and encouraging more activity from membership.

Overland Forums - Registered User Growth 2012

Threads
New content is always important and a forum that has members creating new threads (new topics) generally means new content being created.  'Horizons Unlimited' wins this category followed by the vehicle forum 'Prado Point', which is slightly ahead of two other vehicle based forums.

Obeverland Forums - Thread Growth 2012

If you are looking for additional reading, then feel free to hop onto the following forums and attempt to read your way through these threads...  One comment on the total thread count: I am unable to correlate total thread count to the age of the forum. i.e. a forum could be 20years old, hence the huge thread count.

Posts
The registered member that starts a new thread is always hoping that they will get a good response to their question, trip report or statement.  Here is the average post per thread on the forums, with the winner of this category being 'ADV Rider'. The average is 13 replies per thread.

Alexa Web Traffic
Here are the stats a year on... some websites gained internet popularity whilst others slipped slightly behind.  I am not sure why Alexa reports popularity decline for a few sites when membership is increasing.

Summary

It has been an interesting exercise to review all these sites and to see how the overland community is growing.  I trust that the content remains fresh and that new members are welcomed to these aging forums.  My one comment would be to share your experiences and to inspire others to follow their dreams of independent overland travel.