Another Blog Sneaking up the Rankings
The Dowbrigade worries this blog might unseat his position on the charts. Doubtful, at best. I think he needs to watch Nate Knows Nada, who had more than 18,000 hits by 7 pm. If this scratchpad has around 1,000 a day, I feel incredibly lucky.
But, alas, the Dowbrigade now has more than 400,000, compared to Nate’s 206,000, so it will take Nate a little while to catch up.
(Psst, Nate: what’s your secret? Your referer log and hourly hits don’t show anything odd.)
August 3rd, 2004 at 9:28 pm
If you find out Nate’s secret, please let me know.
August 4th, 2004 at 2:34 pm
J–
My hourlies have run between 2000 and 3000 since the DNC. I think that all my new traffic is the result of being a convention blogger, and the web of links and cross-references among bloggers that that created.
But I can’t figure out why the referrers aren’t correspondingly high….
August 4th, 2004 at 3:38 pm
Nate, the Dowbrigade is going to be insanely jealous. ; ) He also covered the convention, but he hasn’t seen that kind of spike in traffic. Way to go!
We know that referers, hourly hits, and the numbers on the rankings page don’t correspond, but Dave Winer didn’t explain the different to us when he acknowledged it. But it would be great if your referer log picked up what’s happening ’cause then we’d all know. It’s amazing.
August 4th, 2004 at 8:41 pm
I’m also very curious about the difference between the hits and actual human visitors. I’m definitely a non-techie, but I estimate that the hit numbers for any weblog that has lots of links (and grahics) are at least 10 times higher than the number of actual visitors. [See my prior musings on this topic, Those Misleading Traffic Stats, and Phantom Page Hits?]. I’ve never been able to get an explanation for the dscrepancies from the early pioneers of weblogging, many of whom seem to have an emotional or financial stake in the “traffic” numbers seeming as high as possible. The referrer numbers are much closer, but I understand that even they overstate actual visitors by counting search results even when there are no click-throughs and aggregator hits, even if the posting is never viewed by a humanoid.
A couple weeks ago, this topic came up over at Notes from the (Legal) Underground, and I pointed out that by noon on a Sunday in July, months after the last Conference and with no new one in sight, BloggerCon already had 3000 page hits.
Even though our weblogs are predominantly labors of love, it would be nice to a better way to do head-counts instead of hit-counts — if only to keep our own heads from swelling. Couldn’t the length of stay at the site be measured, and anything less than a couple seconds be considered something other than a real person?