Articles published near the start of a month have an advantage when it comes to the Commsrisk monthly rankings. Page views are highest in the days following the publication of a new piece, then decline soon afterwards, with the rate of decline depending on the likelihood that a reader will recommend the post to somebody else. The most popular articles benefit from a dual effect: their headline and subject attract a lot of immediate attention, then the piece gains additional readers over a more elongated period as the URLs are shared via social networks and email. October’s Commsrisk stats were unusual; many of the leading articles were published during the third week of the month, which should have put them at a disadvantage in the rankings. One explanation for their popularity was a sharp rise in readership from India, coincidental to my speaking at conferences in that country.
India consistently ranks as the third-highest country for generating visits to Commsrisk, behind the UK and USA. However, India narrowly pipped the USA to second place in October; Commsrisk received hits from 133 different nations during the month. It is easy to determine the factors that drive the popularity of the website in different countries: size of population, fluency in English, ease of internet access, how advanced and competitive the telecoms market is, whether there are relevant vendors based in that country, and the extent of personal connections to Commsrisk authors. Though we tend to think of the internet as a mass communications medium where anybody might find and follow anybody else, personal acquaintance still influences who we read, especially in a niche like communications risk and assurance. I was nevertheless startled by the impact my Indian trip had on the popularity of this website. Like most of the 133 countries that generated hits for Commsrisk, I had never visited India before. However, the process of shaking hands and speaking to audiences led to a cascade of traffic as new people visited Commsrisk, then shared articles with colleagues.
The impact of my visit to India supports my belief that the global professional community should do more to harness all the talents working in our discipline, wherever they are based. Western English-speaking countries find it easy to communicate their successes, but other parts of the world show tremendous desire when it comes to pushing back the boundaries of risk and assurance. The more connected we are, the more we can learn from each other. I saw evidence that some Indian telcos have world-beating RAFM programs, and are doing work that extends risk and assurance into areas that lie well beyond the definition of RAFM. We need to hear more from them, and I would welcome a wider range of contributions worldwide.
Now here is the rundown of the ten most popular Commsrisk articles during October, as measured by unique page views.
- Six trends in revenue assurance
- Vodafone charging mess leads to huge fine
- Disappearing RAFM conference organizer resurfaces in Africa
- OTT bypass is biggest threat to mobile operators, says Revector survey
- Should assurance teams be in Finance?
- Where are Cartesian’s shares headed?
- Freedom of Information request seeks to reveal the truth about UK telecoms fraud
- Subex extends deadline, names judges for Excellence Awards
- The billion dollar risk
- Australian data retention: time is ticking for telcos…
