Niche? This is Ars. I have a 65" TV above and slightly behind the two primary monitors for background things. There's also two to my left mounted on the ceiling for testing other devices, a laptop display, and sometimes an iPad since that can be used as a display on a mac. A wall-mointed half-rack thrown in there. My husband only has four monitors. On one wall. The other wall has a plasma above a CRT for emulation. I am sure others here have far more absurd setups.
I was actually viewing it from an Analytics perspective. Whether Google Analytics or Cloudflare Analytics or whatever stats-collecting engine used...
Generic statistics analytics engine (without filtering subscriptors vs non-subscriptors) would probably have told Ars staff that 99% are viewing from mobile devices as aggregate, including people who search from Google and people who aren't subscriptors.
But the registered Ars audience and the paying Ars audience is almost assurdely geek-overweight, and big screens are probably
not nearly as niche
among subscriptors, the ones who loiter, the ones who commentator, the ones who already are subscriptors, and the ones who might be considering subscribing, the geek audiencepool that Ars prefers to recruit from, etc.
Even though subscriptors may still view from mobile 90% of the time, it's still less than 99% of a generic Analytics. This drilldown subscriber-layout-preferences data is very valuable to redesigning a site. The niche statistical differences of paying people start to pay for the bills.
I don't know what data Ars has, but I have been caught off guard by the statistical bias between members and non-members, since
due to privacy reasons, generic Analytics data is not broken out in this granular level, and sometimes audience-attracting optimizations miss this. For this reason, separate analytics passes (within the confines of Privacy Policy) to get aggregate data from subscribers (differences in layouts used by subscribers vs non-subscribers).
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Little Known Analytics Accidental Statistics Bias Anecdote (Creating Desktop Degrades):
Even 90% mobile vs 99% mobile means 10x more subscribers using desktop layout than mobile, so sometimes the tiny digits pays the bills surprisingly. It may not be that extreme for Ars, but it can be that extreme for certain desktop-gaming websites (aka geek-heavy websites), which is a capital example of Analytics bias accidents where registered members are more likely browsing from desktop sites percentage-of-time than the unregistered.
Deciding what kind of new-membership to attract is also a different redesign deciding factor. One example is (for me) look at how nicer (holding nose, barfing)... FoxNews layout looks is compared to CNN layout is, even though I prefer CNN (by a gigantic margin), although I prefer the "bias-detecting" Ground News app (boring layout, although due to bias-busting, even more important than layout to me).
ArsTechnica happens to be one of the few I bypass Ground News on. Now, one new worry I have for Ars is that the new layout (might?) attract more future subscriptors of the wrong kind of audience, because of (potential?) overreliance on generic Analytics data and how it's telling us (some big number) 90%+ or 99%+ visitors are now mobile and not filtering to how geeky/lucrative/etc the non-mobile audience is...
I run a geek-heavy blog and realized a
potentially bias-inducing Analytics behavior (and amplified by important accessibility needs) as an insight from this, to make sure I don't blindly follow only the Analytics generics. Management sees generic analytics, and orders prioritization on mobile themes at the cost of desktop themes, causing [unexpected ugly effects / downgrade / enshittification / preferred-word] of some of my favourite tech sites elsewhere on the Internet...
So I learned to, to do supplemental research on the aggregate data of prosumer-use, in order to compensate for this accidental generic Analytics bias. Obviously a bit migeration from a dying geek pool where there seems to be no new subscriber signups, to get more subscriptor market is needed, but I think there's still plenty of more not-yet-paying geeks to recruit from too. Creating a Goldilocks from this is very tough, so I'm giving Ars a lot of slack here;