Looks like Repgeek is dying...(with some statistics)

[Fettekatze]

• Not to bash one forum or the other, but I've noticed that Repgeek has been quiet recently...
• As of right now, RWI has 1240 users online, with about 550 actively viewing the forums, with 120 in the sales forum. Repgeek has 1002 users online, with 250 actively viewing the forums, also with 120 in the sales forum. RWI currently has 4x as many people browsing the brand-specific forums as Repgeek. I don't know how vBulletin generates those numbers or why they're different, but it's obvious that Repgeek has much less non-sales traffic.
• The oldest post on the first page (20 topics) of RWI's Rolex forum is 30 hours old. The same post at Repgeek is 6 days old.
• The oldest post on the first page of RWI's Panerai forum is 44 hours old. The same post at Repgeek is 9 days old.
• The oldest post on the first page of RWI's Rolex forum is 54 hours old. The same post at Repgeek is 12 days old.
• Since both RWI and Repgeek have roughly 250,000 topics and 2,500,000 posts, we can conclude that Repgeek was once top dog, but activity has recently shifted dramatically to RWI. The only active section is the sales forum, which I can assume is equally as active as RWI's due to cross-posting duplicate threads.

 

[If you see Kay]

Yes, it's true with me. I frequent RWI more than Repgeek now. It used to be the other way around.

 

[Spikedlee]

I've been on RG since 2008 back in the day. What I have noticed over the years is the sales forum was overcome with members from Europe (not a bad thing but I only prefer to buy from US members) whereas RWI sales has more CONUS members and just a better selection overall as there are more sales posts here than there. Can't speak to why the activity shifted overall to here because it can't just be about sales, but these are my thoughts after having spent a long time over there.

It's funny because I joined there doing what most of us guys did in the first place - look for a good replica Submariner. As time passed, my income grew and I got away from the replica scene as I was able to afford the gens - actually have my gen Sub on now. I find myself only coming on to look at sales for even higher end stuff - mainly Audemars and posting on the AP thread. Other than that I don't really spend much time on the forum which is my personal reason for not contributing as much.

 

[Fettekatze]

I've been on RG since 2008 back in the day. What I have noticed over the years is the sales forum was overcome with members from Europe (not a bad thing but I only prefer to buy from US members) whereas RWI sales has more CONUS members and just a better selection overall as there are more sales posts here than there. Can't speak to why the activity shifted overall to here because it can't just be about sales, but these are my thoughts after having spent a long time over there. It's funny because I joined there doing what most of us guys did in the first place - look for a good replica Submariner. As time passed, my income grew and I got away from the replica scene as I was able to afford the gens - actually have my gen Sub on now. I find myself only coming on to look at sales for even higher end stuff - mainly Audemars and posting on the AP thread. Other than that I don't really spend much time on the forum which is my personal reason for not contributing as much.

You know, the data backs you up on this. RWI has 34% of its visitors from the US with a US page rank of 30,000, while repgeek has 27% of its visitors from the US with a US page rank of 87,000. Also of note, the RWI sale forum is 3x as active, which makes sense comparing it to the activity of the other subforums, which makes me think the RG sale forum viewer count is skewed.

 

[ShiroTenshi]

I didn't look into the data but pure browsing experience, rwi have much more new posts and threads than RG. Look at the GD section at RG, it's so much quieter.


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[andyr]

i agree, I'm on both and whereas I used to spend equal time on both, RWI is just more active and fresh now, the test for me is who am I going to first without thinking about it and its RWI. I do find RG is better for EU sales, probably because there is a dedicated section there but lets face it a lot of guys are members of both.

 

[erekose]

I started on RG several years ago but I'm now on RWI exclusively 95% of the time. Something fell off there about a year ago and for me it is no longer attractive.

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[adamweby]

I signed up but it was nothing like this so I haven't been back since

 

[Stealthy]

RG was very popular when Angus is still actively involved in the discussion.

 

[Hyjynx]

So you took a snapshot of a moment in time and reached this earthshaking conclusion that the forum is thus moribund? Spurious statistics, my friend. You should first factor those numbers as a percentage of the total membership of each forum. Go on, do the math. Afterwards, I'll walk you thru the fallacy of your reasoning. [emoji6]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli


Come for the watches, stay for the drama! [emoji12]

 

[junbug5150]

^^^ Now this is a cogent statement.

 

[Fettekatze]

So you took a snapshot of a moment in time and reached this earthshaking conclusion that the forum is thus moribund? Spurious statistics, my friend. You should first factor those numbers as a percentage of the total membership of each forum. Go on, do the math. Afterwards, I'll walk you thru the fallacy of your reasoning. [emoji6]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
- Benjamin Disraeli


Come for the watches, stay for the drama! [emoji12]

Yes, that is absolutely my conclusion. Since both forums have almost equal post/topic counts and are close to the same age, and since RWI is currently much more active than RG, it is evident that the activity density for RG is more skewed toward the past than RWI.

Regardless of providing just one snapshot in time, it is statistically impossible for RG to have more instantaneous viewers or a higher daily post count than RWI at any point in time in the near past or near future. RWI is a much higher traffic forum than RG (per Alexa), all the while having similar discussion topics and almost identical posts-per-thread. At the time of this posting, compare General Discussion (6 vs 100) and Brand Forums (40 vs 220). Feel free to compare this at any time and I'd be very very surprised if you ever find RG to be more active.

 

[Alex_P1]

I joined RG after joining here, logged in maybe 5 times to put a wanted ad on for a V2 Breitling Superocean Heritage, account got locked, PM'd the mods to find out what was up/what I'd done wrong, never heard back so never went back!

This is all the rep forum I need, it'd feel like I was cheating if I went anywhere else now.

 

[rj999]

RG was very popular when Angus is still actively involved in the discussion.

I agree. I've been periodically monitoring the Puretime section there. Whoever's been operating the Puretime username has been checking in most days, but not posting. It's interesting that in the last couple of days Angus has re-appeared with news of an amalgamation of Noob with 2 other makers, and indicates that he will be posting more frequently there again.

I got locked out of Repgeek for a long time after I tried to change my email address there. Eventually after various attempts at registering with new names and email addresses, I found that the emails they were sending had issues which meant that most properly set up unix based email servers would reject their mails. Only gmail, which does not use normal email servers, would accept their emails since it accepts anything!.

 

[niotin]

that's not an apples to apples comparison but it is dead. You can just look at the Alexa rankings. (the lower the # the better)

RepGeek: worldwide: 173,062 - USA: 88,886

RWI: worldwide: 67,263 - USA: 30,141

 

[DR3M3L]

Alexa ranking doesn't mean anything these days... Seriously, I've been #4 in The Netherlands with only 50k visitors a month.


I'll share some statistics soon which shows a better and more accurate view on the current situation.

 

[DR3M3L]

Ok here we go.

Back in April I asked exactly the same question: How active is each replica board and how fast do they grow? The answer was simple: Write down the total amount of posts and members each day and fill a database with it. From there I made a simple calculation:

<?php 
foreach($rwi_posts as $rwi_post) { 
      $start = 2125330;
      $show = (isset($prev) ? $rwi_post - $prev : $rwi_post - $start);
      $prev = $rwi_post;
      echo $show . ",";
}

$start is the amount of posts on the very first day, we then loop over each day and take off the previous day. This way we would get a number of daily posts / members. The exact same thing has been done for each replica board I was aware of ( RWI, RG, RWGbz, RWGjr and RHN ).


I've just made the results public on this URL: https://forum.replica-watch.info/stats.php
This is a 15 day period of daily new posts/members statistics.



To add on top I'll make a quick comparison between RG and RWI:

RWI on 2015-04-30:
members: 92620
posts: 2145786

RG on 2015-04-30:
members: 58947
posts: 2535791

RWI today:
members: 104755
posts: 2358015

RG today:
members: 61365
posts: 2586877



So, since the 30th of april the boards have grown with:

RWI: 212,229 posts & 12,135 members
RG: 51,086 posts & 2,418 members...


So RWI is 4,15x as active as RG when it comes to posts and does grow about 5x faster in members.






I'm a geek when it comes to stats. Thanks for a great topic

 

[sub4me]

Simple answer is geek is useless.

 

[turpissima]

I think it would make sense, if both sites merged. I see so many identical threads and the userbase is probably 50-80% the same anyway.

 

[sub4me]

F that, no way.