Who reads The IMS Lantern?

As a complement to my latest post on IMS deployments, I think that an analysis of the audience of The IMS Lantern can provide interesting insights about the IMS community all over the world.

Since June 2007, this blog generated over 41,000 visits from 132 countries.

Worldwide audience

From a continental perspective, Europe accounts for half of the traffic and generated more than twice as many visits as the Americas and Asia, which are head to head.

However, the USA are, by a large margin, the country which tops the others in terms of traffic.

Here are the top 20 countries:

1.	United States
2.	France
3.	India
4.	Germany
5.	United Kingdom
6.	Sweden
7.	Canada
8.	Spain
9.	South Korea
10.	Switzerland
11.	Italy
12.	Netherlands
13.	Japan
14.	Slovenia
15.	Israel
16.	China
17.	Singapore
18.	Taiwan
19.	Austria

Companies

Visits come from three main types of companies:

- Big network equipment vendors including those leading on the IMS market, but not only.

- Operators, mainly from the USA, Canada, France, Spain, Germany, South Korea, Japan and Australia.

- Application service suppliers, with a huge domination from India.

However, a significant part of the traffic is also generated by smaller vendors providing equipments, services or OSS/BSS systems, by suppliers of service platforms, and by research centers, engineering schools and universities.

Subjects of interest

Visitors are mainly interested in posts describing technical details about the IMS service architecture, IMS identities, the SCIM, and IMS data management. This may hint at a deficiency in the way the literature, courses and IMS specifications address these topics.

Just behind come posts dedicated to the innovative features of SIP and the IMS service architecture, like the User Oriented Architecture (UOA), fixed mobile convergence, multimedia SIP sessions and CPM, and the various service patterns I had the opportunity to describe. I am personally very happy to see that CPM, which is by far the most ambitious IMS standardization initiative, attracts a lot of curiosity and is often entered as a keyword in search engines. Moreover, the post dedicated to it is the one visitors spend the most time on. Another source of more personal satisfaction is to see that the concept of User Oriented Architecture that I associated to the IMS has started to spread outside of the blog, even if it is far from having reached mainstream acceptance yet.

The IMS Lantern therefore seems to be accessed as both an educational and thought-provoking resource on the IMS.

Sources of traffic

Visits mainly come from search engines with IMS-related queries and from people who regularly visit the blog or get notified about new posts.

A smaller portion of the traffic comes from links on other sites (mainly blogs addressing telecom or technological topics). I have done very little to advertise The IMS Lantern on the Internet, but do not hesitate to link to it if you have the opportunity to do so.

Influence

Does The IMS Lantern have an influence on the work of some people or companies in the industry?

I know from direct contacts and some references visible on the Internet that The IMS Lantern has influenced research activities, the writing of theses, articles and even a book that will be published in the coming months.

It is a great source of motivation for me to learn that others can benefit from what I am writing and I have no problem with the reuse of ideas and information I am providing through this blog. So don't be shy: if this blog has a direct or indirect influence on what you are doing, just let me know.