By the Numbers: July 21, 2008
By Marino 73 Comments
The majority of Giant Bomb first went live on July 21, 2008. That's 508 reviews, almost 300 podcasts, nearly 200,000 forum topics, 6000+ videos, 4 E3's, 7 PAX's, 3 (official) Endurance Runs, and 2 Big Live Live Shows in the span of just four years. So, thanks in part to a suggestion from , I thought it might be cool to look at some of the site's stats from those early days. Can you remember that far back? It was a bit chaotic. I wasn't a moderator at the time, but I've heard the horror stories.
Some of the statistics that you may have seen in the June Data Dump aren't on here. It appears that some of those stats don't go that far back. But, let's take a look at some of the numbers.
July 21, 2008
The amount of activity on the site on the first day is barely believable. Take a look at some of these crazy numbers.
- Blogs - 1600
- Forum Topics - 1594
- Forum Replies - 26,602
- User Reviews - 1307
- New Wiki Pages - 2911
- Wiki Submissions - 11,591
Blogs
Naturally, it seems most users wanted to test out all the new stuff when the site first launched. That means 1600 blogs were created on the very first day. After a few days, it evened out to about 250 per day.
Forums
The first image here shows the number of comments in different areas of the site. The second image shows that there were an astounding 26,000+ replies to forum topics on the first day. To put that in perspective, we're averaging about 2200 per day this month. The third image shows the users with the most comments in July 2008, which was the first full week+ the site was up. The fourth image shows which forums had the most created topics on the first day. Yep, that's the Hamburger forum at #4. The fifth image shows that a whopping 1600 topics were created on the first day before it evened out to around 500 the rest of the first month. The last image tells us what the top 10 most active topics were on the first day. Looks like some standard introductory topics there. How old are you? Where did you hear about GB? Are hamburgers sandwiches?
Reviews
So fifty people signed up for Giant Bomb and immediately wrote a review for Metal Gear Solid 4. That seems kinda crazy to me, but what's really insane is the second picture shows that over 1250 total reviews were written that day. The "None" in the first image must be a game page that at some point got deleted. I don't know for sure though.
Wiki
The first image here shows a daily record of the types of new pages that were added to the site in July 2008. The second image totals up each category within that same time period, which was basically the first week of the site. Yep, that's over 7,000 characters added to the site in just a week. That's just a little less than one third of the total characters on the site four years later. Wiki editors are kinda crazy.
Okay, what we've got here in the first image is a look at the total number of wiki submissions per day and whether or not they were accepted. Looks like about 20% of the submissions on day one were rejected by moderators. 2500 rejects in one day. Damn, that's a lot. Right now the average number of rejections in a day is in single digits. The second image shows the submissions broken into what type they were, while the third is the same data, just with character and game data removed so you can see some of the less popular data.
The first image here is the most active wiki pages based on edits made in the first week of the site being up. I have no earthly idea what that first one is/was. If I had to guess, it was probably some rampant plagiarism that got a page deleted. Since the bar graphs are distorted because of that, I'll let you know that Halo 3 had 634 edits followed by Mass Effect with 584. The rest were pretty close with MGS4 wrapping up the Top 10 with 524.
The second image shows the top 10 wiki editors based on number of edits (not points). It doesn't appear that I can pull points data from that far back. I'm not sure why.
Who were the top wiki moderators in the olden days? These are the duders who did the brunt of the work laying the foundation of what you see on the wiki today. The first image shows the top wiki mods for all of 2008, while the second image shows the top wiki mods for July 2008. It looks like was truly a beast during the first week of the site's existence. That's 16,824 moderations by just him in the first week of the site. To put that in perspective, was the top wiki moderator in June 2012 with about 1200 moderations.
It's worth noting that is the only remaining member of the mod team from these top 10 charts.
See ya in a couple weeks for the July 2012 data dump!