We haven’t got around to posting the stats on our readership and advertising income (earned rather than paid still!) for June yet – to come shortly – but I did want to note Tim Watts’ post about Andrew Bolt’s stats post:
Thanks very much for all your support. The figures for the month aren’t all in, obviously, but we’ve already cracked the million: 1,077,334 hits for July.
Watts notes – rightly – that whatever you think of Bolt’s choice of subject matter and approach to it, he is one of the very few MSM “bloggers” who does get the form and do it well. But he doesn’t seem to get metrics. I’m not the first person on his thread to point out that “page impressions” doesn’t actually give you a direct take on the number of readers – if he were to disclose the number of unique visits, it’d be a much more worthwhile exercise. By way of comparison, LP got 1,442,702 “page impressions” (in Bolt’s terms) in July and topped one and a half million in May and June.
For those who are interested in these things, a recent check on how much of that traffic was to images suggests only about 1.4%. But page impressions or page views really just tells you how many of each and every page with a url of its own was viewed. In LP’s case, a not insignificant amount of this is the “long tail” phenomenon and consists of accessing old posts. It’s exclusive of bots doing indexing and spammers, and I imagine Bolt’s figure is as well, but he needs to put it in its proper context.
Update: Andrew Bolt is so proud of his “million page impressions” – take that, lefty journos! – he’s written a column in the mainstream media paper that employs him to write his blog to decry the media and talk up “blogging”. Which is what he does. Not media. Go figure. I imagine he’ll take his outsider message to Insiders on Sunday.
Really? I’ll have to make more searches on “chicks with guns” more often. (New readers: try it with my compliments).
Oh, and Tim Blair’s post on this post in three, two, one…
Congratz is due to any Australian blog that pulls those sorts of numbers.
But Bolt’s blog is not strictly an ‘Australian political blog’ as he claims.
Unless you block visitors from outside Australia, every blog is international. I’d also imagine that having one of his columns linked up on Drudge Report for three days or so helped enormously in pushing that total monthly page impression total to over a million.
From what I understand, the Herald Sun and Courier Mail sites that almost daily promote his blog pull more than 500,000 PIs per day, so a million PIs a month doesn’t look so impressive. Still good news, however, for Australian blogs and the further breaking of the MSM strangehold on news, opinion and debate.
How high would Bolt’s PI total be if he went independent, and had to give up all that news.com.au-related traffic? There’s only one way for Bolt to find out, isn’t there?
It always strikes me as stupid that Bolt rages against ‘the media’ while being one of the highest profile (thanks to Murdoch and the ABC) media talking heads in the country. The hypocrisy continues when he always links to a story from SMH or The Age on global warming ‘hysteria’ when his own newspaper, and other Australian Murdoch news websites, run exactly the same stories, often with far more over-the-top headlines.
Size isn’t everything, Kim. But well done anyway.
Is it dick-waving day? Someone ring NineMSN for comments.
a case of hits-envy?
I don’t think the you can really compare two sites whether it be page impressions or unique visitors. This site is a group blog, almost an aggregation of individual blogs.
Unique visitor information would be useful – I’d guess Bolt would have a higher ratio of unique visitors because of all the links he gets from the news sites. More people who just visit once for an interesting looking post and never return.
“… people who just visit once for an interesting looking post and never return.”
Surely you meant people who just visit once for an interesting looking post and never found one”.
The plainest way to avoid conjecture about traffic, impressions, views, uniques, and the easiest way to assess it, is to have your stats open for public viewing.
Which we do, sort of, Tony T, in that we report on the unique visitors, visits, page views etc. every month. I don’t know if you mean all the server stats including which pages get most views, etc, referrer stats, etc, but that information in raw form tends to pretty meaningless in the absence of some analysis.
Mark – do you know how many people regularly (making up some arbitrary threshold like at least once a week) comment on this site? Just curious.
Chris, I think that such a metric would have to derived by manually counting comments by individual.
The site stats say 22090 comments in the last month. But I think that includes spam comments. I could go back through WP and get an accurate figure excluding spam but it would take a long long time.
So the short answer is no, we don’t know.
*swaggers in*
Well, I dont like to brag, but Bite my Latte has had over 330 visitors in 2 months. From 20 countries.
And in case you think I am artifically inflating those figures – I can assure you Ive set up the neocounter software to exclude my logons both at home, and work!
Well over 100 comments now, of which up to 56 were not me!
20 countries eh? Were most of the baristas, its being a latte site for the latte set?
most of *them*
Update: Andrew Bolt is so proud of his “million page impressions” – take that, lefty journos! – he’s written a column in the mainstream media paper that employs him to write his blog to decry the media and talk up “blogging”. Which is what he does. Not media. Go figure. I imagine he’ll take his outsider message to Insiders on Sunday.
I must confess, the 2 hits from Cuba were….. possibly me. However, all the rest are legit.
Its a Latte with bite.
Am I right in interpreting Bolt that only RWDBs use teh Internet? Or doesn’t he read left wing blogs.
Kim – np just thought you might have some db scripts which do it for you automatically.
Sorry, no, Chris, I agree it would be interesting to know.
Graeme Bird is up to 66,777 hits. He must be the biggest thing to come out of New Zealand since the Finn Bros. http://graemebird.wordpress.com/