Someone at Campaigns & Elections magazine interviewed me awhile back about my blog. You can see the result of that here.
Anything about that page jump out at you? What jumped out at me was Will’s claim that FITS News gets an average of 5,000 to 7,000 page views a day. Either that, or his preferred estimate of "eleventy kabillion."
What do y’all think? Maybe it’s possible, since he does a pretty fair job of keeping it current, and works hard at breaking news — which I have a newspaper to do for me, relieving me of that burden. I think of my blog as supplemental, not the main course.
But I’m sort of thinking that Will didn’t do what I did, which was to err on the conservative side. I said 1,000 a day. But I just went and checked, and for the last six months, it’s been more than 1,200 a day average. That is, if I did the spreadsheet calculation right. I sort of think I didn’t; that seems high to me. I know some of y’all are better at Excel than I am, so here are my current stats from Typepad — you do the math.
I asked Theodora Blanchfield if she had any substantiation for Will’s numbers. She said:
As I said in the intro, we just asked all the bloggers for their hits and
qualified that, therefore, they should be taken with a grain of salt.
Fortunately, I have low blood pressure, so I can use all the salt I want.
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So can I assume that the # of views is not related to the # of unique viewers? The latter would be a more meaningful statistic.
If someone like me who reads regularly checks what’s new a dozen times during the day, does that really mean anything?
View #’s could easily be rigged. Unique IP addresses could not.
Based on the number of comments on FITSnews, I highly doubt the numbers are as high as claimed. Although his stuff tends to be less likely to inspire a response…
And just to give you something to shoot for, Brad, here’s Drudge’s numbers from today:
VISITS TO DRUDGE 10/19/07
016,560,759 IN PAST 24 HOURS
435,341,287 IN PAST 31 DAYS
4,899,740,036 IN PAST YEAR
Amazing…
“Page views” is the only measurement Typepad supplies me with.
Drudge is proof that being in on the ground floor of blogging is like being among the first to invest in Microsoft — it pays.
I certainly had a dramatic demonstration of what numbers like his can do. All he had to do is link to one column of mine (and unfortunately for my blog numbers, he did it to the version on thestate.com, not the blog version), and that column got over 190,000 hits. It’s kind of spooky.
Well, I can take comfort from one thing — I just leafed through the supplement, and aside from Will, only one of the blogs highlighted claims more traffic than I get (1,500 a day) — and he gets a lot fewer comments. There’s one other that claims more than I claimed, at 1,100, but as I said, my count today puts my real traffic higher than that. And for what it’s worth, that one is light on comments as well.
For whatever it’s worth, during busy times (such as the Ravenel stories), I go over 1000, I generally get between 300 and 500 on weekdays. 424 yesterday. Less on weekends.
Yeah, I get an average of 1,500 daily on weekdays, but the weekends are so low they pull down the overall average to less than 1,300.
I guess it’s true that people mainly blog when they’re SUPPOSED to be working. That means I’m a counterproductive distraction — which is just what some of my teachers in school would have predicted I’d be.
I’ve read a few SC blogs and wonder if up is down and down is up sometimes, especially when you cite numbers like 5000 for some blogs.
What do you think generates readership? Is it timeliness of content? Quality of content? Relevance of content? Uniqueness of content? Access of content? Awareness of content?
I could never imagine receiving 1000 hits a day. It’s never happened. I’ve never even come close to that. I’m still fairly new at this blogging stuff (I’ve only been doing it since February), so I’m happy any day I crack 50. Gotta start somewhere!
Keep up the good blogging.