PhotoDude.com

Tue. Apr 09, 2002

The Relativity of Numbers

The Relativity of Numbers – With regards to the recent debate about web log traffic numbers versus traditional media, etc., perhaps Tom Tomorrow says it best: "...I think blogging is a great thing, proof that the internet, unlike any other mass communications medium, will always have room for the individual voice. I mean, if you want to play the numbers game, think of it this way: when I was a young cartoonist in Iowa, I had to xerox up little zines of my work, in editions of fifty or a hundred, and convince the local bookstore to try to sell them, and after a month or two, I might have sold twenty or thirty copies to other people living in that one small town. Today, a young cartoonist like August Pollok can reach ten times that number of people in a single week, and in terms of self-publishing, that’s extraordinary." (don’t know why the images don’t appear for me in the archives. You can see the site in all it’s glory, and scroll to the entry)

That’s the power of the web I discovered on Day One (for me, 6 years ago this month), a power thousands are now finding via web logs. In 1995, I had banged my head repeatedly up against the brick wall known as The Local Art Gallery Market, and found that there was very little space for me to display my 20 image series, and rightfully, many people far more deserving ahead of me in line.

Not long after, I’m reading about this World Wide Web thang, along with Archie, Veronica, and Gopher (not cartoon characters, but now just about as dead). I got my first computer, and within three months had learned enough to inflict my bad design, hack filled code, and poorly compressed images upon the digital world.

I had my own gallery. Within a year, I was thrilled to find one day I was averaging 50 people a day stopping by my gallery to see my work. A mere two years before, I couldn’t get a single print hung on a single gallery wall.

That’s the power of the web, whether it the form of communication is photography or the written word.

Oh, yeah, I’ll add to that statistical disclosure thing every one else is doing, but I’m moving the boring stats off front page.

As others have said, site stats can be deceptive. A report of 1,000 visitors to your weblog in a day could be 1,000 individuals, but is more likely in the range of 300 to 600, many of whom visited your page more than one time that day. And so far as I’ve seen, all the talk has been purely about weblogs.

My situation is somewhat different. My site existed for almost 4 years before I launched a weblog, and was already the digital equivalent of kudzu before I knew how to pronounce ”bloo-ger” (that is how you pronounce it, isn’t it?). Its vines and roots are deeply entrenched in various search engines, garnering high returns for an amazing number of search terms (from atlanta web log to flash examples to hoochie mamas), fully 40% of my traffic comes from these returns (including some to my weblog), and I think you can assume those are unique visitors, not recurrent ones.

My stats from June, 2000 (the month before I launched my weblog) show I had about 4,000 visitors that month, about 130 per day. Last month, site wide, I had just shy of 30,000 visits, almost a thousand a day. Less than 40% of that traffic was to my weblog …. even if you include my front door home page as part of the weblog.

So I’ve got two versions of stats to report. The main numbers are for just my weblog and its linked entry pages (including PixelPile and QuoteLog), as reported by Sitemeter. The bracketed numbers, [29,227], represent the same statistic for my entire site, including the web log, as reported by my host’s stats service, Urchin.

In March, there were just just shy of 11,000 visitors to my weblog [29,227 site-wide], about 350 a day [940], generating 20,000 page views [122,575]. Extremes are a slow Sunday with 250 visitors [656], and a highly linked Tuesday with over 1,500 visitors [2,783]. Like others have reported, I’ve seen a surge in traffic in the past couple of weeks. In the first 9 days of April, there have been about 5700 visitors [10,774], an average of over 600 a day [1,197]. By comparison, last August when no one had a clue what a ”warblogger” might be, I had a little over 5,000 visitors [18,302], maybe 175 a day [610]. And my weblog was ”silent” for almost half that month.

The biggest surprise: according the this graphic I have twice as many visitors from Europe as I do from the western half of the US.