Website statistics (web-stats) exist to answer the question – “How many people are looking at my website?” When it comes to blogs, they suck at it.
It’s been a couple of years since I was a ’stats monkey’ – obsessively reloading a page of numbers, observing every click on my sites with such mania you would have assumed I was getting a congratulatory crack-hit each time the numbers went up. During recent investigations into the state or web-stats, it’s clear that though the web has been changed by RSS, web-stats have stayed the same.
Before blogs were big, the assumption web stats were built on was:
Number of unique clicks = Number of people
It was simple, and it almost worked (of course how much time needed to pass before a click was counted as ‘unique’ was a matter of debate, allowing people to inflate their numbers by shortening the interval.) It was safe to assume that the people consuming your content were visiting your site and reading it.
In the age of RSS this doesn’t hold true. E.g., according to Technorati SugarBank is the 9th most significant ‘porn’ blog (with Viviane delicately skimming my rear… mmmmmn.)
Bollocks. SugarBank’s probably not in the top 100 porn related blogs. Why the gross inflation? (Gross inflation’s a movie you’ve got to see by the way, it’s amazing what you can do with a lot of breath and a full condom).
Technorati’s counting links made to blogs, like SugarBank, that use the word ‘porn’ as a tag. Huge blogs like Fleshbot, which don’t use the porn tag, don’t appear. While counting links is a precise measure of how many other bloggers link to you, what does it tell you about how many people read your blog? It assumes that 50 links from blogs with a single reader each, is worth more than one link from a blog read by thousands. That’s incredibly dumb.
In the age of RSS, to have any idea of how ‘big’ a blog is you need to account for:
- Subscribers (how many there are, and how many read each post on average)
- Unique visitors (how many there are, measured the same way for each blog)
- Comments (per article and posted recently)
- Links in (where those links are from and how often they’re used)
- Trackbacks and Pingbacks
- Page-views
- Words read per visitor (is a blog people read in detail more important than one they skim? How can we measure words read anyway?)
- Downloads (if you’re podcasting, this is directly relevant. If you offer downloadable PDF’s, that needs measuring too.)
But no-one does this (yet?), and the reach of an individual blog is impossible to guage using the old tools.
Is SugarBank, with a couple of thousand unique visitors a day, over a hundred and fifty pages and roughly 250 subscribers reading daily – bigger or smaller than Podnography, with less than 10 pages, less than a hundred unique visitors a day, and over 500 subscribers reading daily?
I have little idea.
Given the number of blogs out there where’s a better solution going to come from? Shall we build our own? How?
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