November 14, 2004

Echo Statistics - Where The Referers Are

It's been a while since I did some detailed Readership Analysis, so I went and checked over my logs to get some fresh data. I wanted to answer the question: "What's the best I've done recently at being heard, and where?".

For all of September and October, I had only one regular blog post which, again cumulative over the entire two months, registered over 1000 readers, specifically 1112 total unique IP address accesses. I know, I know, people will tell me not to complain, there are bloggers starving in Africa (or enslaved in Sudan). But this is my absolute personal best for over two months - and note it's less than one popular Slashdot comment, or the daily readership for some not even A-list.

The stand-out item was the BNETD / Blizzard entry, which concerned the horror of that court decision for fair use. The echoes broke down from major sources as follows:

Total = 1112 (excludes constant regular blog audience)

lwn.net29026.1%
unknown25823.2%
freedom-to-tinker discussion1029.2%
Wes Felter echo857.6%
Ernest Miller echo716.4%
Google searches on keywords (later)877.8%
weblog.foopee.org595.3%
Groklaw discussion mention464.1%
sethf.com (i.e. later blog entries)393.5%
digitalconsumer.org232.1%

Not exactly a Slashdot effect, but instructive in the distribution.

No echoes == no audience.

By Seth Finkelstein | posted in statistics | on November 14, 2004 11:59 PM (Infothought permalink) | Followups
Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)

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Comments

Keep in mind, though, that you're syndicated here and there via RSS. Most of the bloggers I read I read almost completely via RSS, so it's doubtful that that will show up in the same sort of readable fashion as a straight page hit.

Some needs to figure out how to meter RSS, I think.

Posted by: Graye at November 15, 2004 09:28 PM

Yes, of course. The RSS audience I'd call part of the "constant" audience, and I know that's around 300. Given that I run my own domain, instead of using a community service such as livejournal or blogspot, I can do very detailed log analysis. So I have direct access to the number of feed retrievals, for example, as well as the notes Bloglines puts in its referer string saying how many subscribers for a feed.

What I was doing here was specifically looking at the "spikes", the echoes. That is, how much audience I ever get beyond the core fans. It's relevant to know that the answer is "rarely" and "not a lot" (that may be depressing, but it doesn't change the numbers).

Note, again, the 300-reader estimate isn't perfect, it could be off by some margin. But it's not off by a factor of 10.

Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at November 15, 2004 11:14 PM