<p>I cannot tell you how people <em>first</em> find this site, but I can share some statistics provided I am not too "specific."  During the lifetime of this site (including pre-beta and beta phases, up through the beginning of February 2015, four and a half years in),</p>

<ul>
<li><p>A strong majority of visits were referred by search engines.</p></li>
<li><p>Half of the rest were referred from other sites.  Most of these were google.com or stackoverflow.com.</p></li>
<li><p>The remainder were direct traffic.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>Most of the search engine visits used an unknown search term.  The most popular search phrases among those that are known include "statistics stackexchange" and "statistics stack exchange," which perhaps should be considered "direct traffic." But these are a tiny fraction of the new visits.</p>

<hr>

<p>Here are some related numbers to ponder.  Most of them can be gleaned from information readily available to anybody.</p>

<p>As anyone who looks at our main page can tell, we have had 50,000 questions asked.  The number of answers posted is almost the same.  These are a minuscule fraction of all visits.</p>

<p>I don't have information on the number of comments posted, but would guess there would be several times as many as the number of questions plus answers: perhaps a half million total, just a few percent of all visits.  (Some of us average many comments per visit, btw. :-)</p>

<p>The total number of votes (up, down, accepted, etc.) is roughly 1.5% of the number of visits.</p>

<p>The number of edits is less than 10% of the total number of posts--very few posts are edited by the community.</p>

<p><strong>The vast majority of visits therefore involve passive interaction only:</strong> no posting or voting of any kind.</p>
