WEBLOG TRAFFIC RANKINGS II
Bear has provided the actual Excel file with the information to follow up on yesterday’s post. Based on the current scan, here’s the info:
*Command Post shows up as #13, 14 and 15 because of duplicate listings. I only count it once. I suspect there are other duplicates further down the list that I didn’t weed out. Doing so would likely increase the robustness of the results.
Update (1313): One thing that occurs to me is that, given the overwhelming traffic disparity of the top handful of sites vs all the rest is that the traffic ratings of the “second tier” blogs are likely *highly* volatile based on linkage by one of the top blogs. For example, a site regularly getting 250 visitors would just to well over 1000 visitors (weekly average) with a good InstaLanche. My own traffic was averaging in the 500s for quite some time but is now over 800 thanks to several links by higher traffic blogs, notably Kevin Drum’s CalPundit and Don Sensing’s One Hand Clapping.
And, of course, to reiterate the point made by Kevin in the comments of the original post, several of the most prominent blogs, including Andrew Sullivan’s, are missing from this dataset since they don’t use SiteMeter. If they were included, the trend would almost certainly be much more pronounced, as they’d likely nearly double the number of 10,000+ visitor blogs and nearly triple the number of 20,000+ visitor blogs.
I risk being bashing into oblivion by saying this but I never realized how small the blogosphere was.
If ~1000 blogs combined are only getting 326,000 hits a day that is just tiny fraction of what I thought it was. If you consider…
Most bloggers will check out 10-20 other blogs a day*
and
Much of that traffic is the bloggers themselves editing thier own sites…
the number of people from outside the subculture is statistically miniscule compared to the people on the internet.
huh!
Paul
* this is a guess from what I hear people say. I have no idea if this is even measured. Put your favorite number in, the point is still valid.
Paul,
It is indeed quite small. SiteMeter doesn’t count much of the self-checking, so that’s rather miniscule. And there are thousands of blogs not listed in the TTLB Ecosystem or included in the traffic ratings. But, still, I’d guess there are porn sites getting 300,000 visits a day.
Also: Note that the data is VISITS rather than PAGE VIEWS or HITS. The others would be much higher. For example, my own internal counter by my host shows 8132 unique visitors, 21248 visits, 76483 pages, and 296483 hits so far in July.
Paul-
With SiteMeter, (and some other counters), you can disable your own IP from being counted. I don’t know how many people actually do this–I would suspect if someone wanted accurate numbers they would and the ones who want to appear that they have more traffic than they do, wouldn’t. But it is possible to not count your own visits.
Paul and Serenity,
As Kevin of Wizbang reported when I brought up that issue a while back, even if you don’t disable your own IP, SiteMeter only counts visits from a given IP that are over 30 minutes apart. So, if the blogger logs on to his own sites once every 20 minutes during all his waking hours, that’s just one hit. Even if they’re strategically trying to inflate their own count, we’re talking only a handful a day.
I’ve noticed something strange about some sites. There is NOT a large difference between their page views and visitors in a day. I usually have almost twice the page views as I do visitors.
But I post a lot, and I suppose people check back frequently to see if something new is there.
I don’t hide my stats. You can check for yourself.
Acidman,
That’s interesting. Yours is 1.54 page views per visit. Mine is 1.48. InstaPundit’s is 1.26.