The First Annual Real Life LEED Index!

It's hard to believe it, but Real Life LEED just turned ONE! For those of you that don't know I'm a giant data geek, and in the spirit of the Feltron Report (Full Disclosure: the following will be nowhere near as obsessively awesome), I've decided to share a few statistics about who's been using the site that I found interesting. First, some context... all info reflects traffic from March 21, 2008 to March 21, 2009:

Posts

Traffic

  • Total Unique Visitors: 37,485
  • Total Visits: 57,443
  • Total Pageviews: 115,636

Geography

This to me is the most interesting information. If you assume that visitors to this site is a proxy for LEED activity (a bit of a stretch I know), you see some interesting results. If you look at total numbers of visitors for a given location, you get what you would expect... The US, and California in particular, dominate traffic. But when you compare that to resident population of a given area (essentially LEED 'density'), some surprising results emerge...  First, the top ten countries by volume only:

  1. United States:   85.9%
  2. Canada: 3.99%
  3. United Arab Emirates: 1.79%
  4. United Kingdom: 0.87%
  5. India: 0.78%
  6. Spain: 0.52%
  7. Hong Kong: 0.47%
  8. Germany: 0.46%
  9. Mexico: 0.39%
  10. Taiwan: 0.31%

Drops off pretty quick, huh? Now let's look at the number of visits per 100,000 residents:

Real Life LEED Traffic

Dubai wins again... you always do! Hong Kong also does a fair amount of reading as well, surpassing Canada by a fair margin.  It will be interesting to see how the economy affects these numbers over the course of the next year... Couldn't care less about the UAE? Let's take a look at the state by state breakdown within the US. First, by volume alone:

  1. California: 14.85%
  2. New York: 8.33%
  3. Texas: 6.41%
  4. Illinois: 5.43%
  5. Virginia: 4.79%
  6. Florida: 4.74%
  7. Massachusetts: 3.80%
  8. Georgia: 3.73%
  9. Michigan: 3.53%
  10. Pennsylvania: 3.25%

Again, nothing surprising... the 'green' centers of the US feature prominently... but what happens when you look at visits compared to total population?

Real Life LEED Traffic - States

DC is litteraly off the charts... Their ratio of readers to 100,000 residents is over 130!  South Carolina is a distant second, and I attribute the popularity here to a combination of the Colbert Bump (he vacations nearby) and my own vanity. Clearly there is a surge in the DMV region (1, 4, and 3 respectively), and I can only hope that is not due to an army of USGBC lawyers making a case for slander against me (see this post). The biggest surprise to me is Idaho, coming in a solid 5th, followed closely by Hawaii, New York, Illinois, Colorado, and Nevada rounding out the top ten.

So that's the first amateurish attempt at defining the relative popularity of LEED with exceptionally crude and questionably accurate means. A full (and equally crude) spreadsheet with more detailed numbers can be found here. See any interesting trends that I missed? Let me know by leaving a comment!

3 comments:

nar said...

Joel-
Really interesting data, and congrats on one year. I had to give props for the sentence under the worldwide bar graph, which will mean nothing to most people, but you obviously get it. Sustainability...Goulet!

joelmckellar said...

She bop, she bang, doo wop, thong song!

Sally said...

Happy birthday!!!