Muriel Newman's latest newsletter boasts her NZCPR website "is now getting almost a million hits a month." Now Muriel often has good content, but as I filed her newsletter and read that number again I thought, "That's a lot of hits. I wonder if she's right."
Lindsay Mitchell thought the same thing, but she did something about it. She asked blogger David Farrar. With just over 170,000 visitors a month his Kiwiblog site is probably the most visited NZ political blog, and certainly the only prominent one for whom reliable site stats are made public. Explains Dave, "hits" isn't a measure of visitors, it's a function instead of how many files there are on your site's front page. Who knew? He suggested that for a meaningful measure of a site's success, Lindsay check out Alexa traffic rankings, which she did. When I checked today, Alexa was ranking some prominent NZ political sites as follows (numbers reflect Alexa's ranking of the site in world terms):
Scoop, 41,667
David Farrar's Kiwiblog 60,424
Russell Brown's Public Address 179,932
Lindsay Perigo's SOLO 218,369
The Greens' Frog Blog 232,026
ScoopIt 253,291
Not PC 326,803
No Right Turn 497,535
Whale Oil 727,950
Jordan Carter's Just Left 989,176
Muriel Newman's NZCPR 1,299,144
Ian Wishhard's Briefing Room 1,352,239
So Muriel ranks better than Wishhard (which is gratifying) but not as well as some others, this blog included. And at 326,803rd in the world, I can assure you that while Not PC's statcounter ticks over quite nicely, thank you, with about ten to fifteen percent of David's lordly total, I don't get anywhere near one million hits a month.
But that's not for want of trying.
UPDATE: Just rechecking those figures now for a later post, 29 December 2007, most of those figures are much the same, but Whale Oil in particular has rocketed up the rankings, and Wish-hard and No-Comment-At-No-Right-Turn have taken a plunge. Here's today's rankings, with a few newbies thrown in for comparison ...
Scoop, 44,617
David Farrar's Kiwiblog 73,703
Russell Brown's Public Address 184,037
Whale Oil 184,185
The Greens' Frog Blog 224,151
ScoopIt 252,433
Lindsay Perigo's SOLO 254,748
Not PC 345,207
Indymedia 388,857
SubStandard 533,395
Kiwibogbog 654,832
No Right Turn 930,659
Jordan Carter's Just Left 1,167,893
Muriel Newman's NZCPR 1,178,343
Ian Wishhard's Briefing Room 2,316,121
Anarchia 4,139,662
2 comments:
It could be softbots (software robots) that crawls most sites either to index , spamming, or do malicious activities. Softbots always inflate the number of pagehits.
Peter, 100 lines for you Bart Simpson style:
"I promise not to take anything Muriel Newman says seriously".
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