Posted on 10/07/2007 3:19:23 PM PDT by melt
Yesterday, I had the good “fortune” of being frontpaged on Daily Kos. The post sat atop the site for two hours. According to Google Analytics, the link produced 1,164 visitors yesterday. For the traffic behemoth Kos is portrayed as, that seems low, especially since he linked to two posts of mine. I went and looked at other notable traffic spikes this year, and this one isn’t really even close to some other blockbuster links.
For instance,
A Marc Ambinder link (linked to by Andrew Sullivan) to my 2008 Wire videowall produced 2,205 visits on June 5th.
A link from the Real Clear Politics homepage on August 17th produced 1,889 visits. Now, Kos was semi-complimentary in his link. He wasn’t direct in telling his readers to rape and pillage my servers. And I know well that the wording of a link and how it’s presented can dramatically impact the clickthrough rate. If there’s a site I need to link to but I don’t want to reward with lots of traffic, I hyperlink certain words and not others to minimize clickthrough (in addition to sticking in a rel=”nofollow” directive).
But this got me thinking, especially since a sub-theme in the linked post suggested Kos was not all he was cracked up to be in terms of his audience size.
Earlier today, it was pointed out to me that Kos’s average visit length was all of 2 seconds, suggesting either a coordinated attempt to bomb the site with fake traffic or an extremely low level of engagement on the part of his readers. This seemed as remarkable, given the breathless huffing and puffing about his community platform being a game changer in terms of traffic and audience reach.
So I started to do some digging around his SiteMeter stats...
(Excerpt) Read more at patrickruffini.com ...
Alexa requires that a computer be infected with their spyware. Since I don’t use IE, they can’t get traffic statistics from me.
I said *could* I’ll leave the reasonability of it for others to judge. I think 60% as the article claims is unreasonable to conclude, but it is reasonable to believe they are inflated by virtue of the flaw built into SiteMeter.
It’s a little confusing because the numbers show rank. The higher the line, the closer you are to number 1.
Bump
spyware blockers have the same invisibility effect.
Couple this (and other instances of false bravado) with liberal Democrat shenanigans at the voting booth and you have a tyranny of the minority. The Party of Abortion, Death, Taxation, and Mediocrity rules. Things need to change.
compare this with the LAtimes and NYT lying about their distribution for ad dollars.
BTW folks the kos founder obtained his permanent residency by serving time in the us miliary. something to think about with the Dream Act AMNESTY push to put illegals in the military.
It's a picture of dogs wearing helmets.
Thought it was casually funny.
BTW, Kos only has about 3000 active members, in a world of 5billion people.
Just FYI
That makes a lot more sense to me than 600,000.
can we contrast the active members of FR to kos?
actually this is the kind of left wing squirm that would really look good on drudge.
(grin)
Bringing to Martin Fierro’s attention, for Hooligan purposes.
glad I wasn’t the only one....
Alexa requires that a computer be infected with their spyware. Since I don’t use IE, they can’t get traffic statistics from me.There is an Alexa toolbar for Firefox. IIRC, this was howit got started - before the IE version.
Its refreshing to know there aren’t as many Kooks as they report. Wonder how their advertisers feel about that??
Pray for W and Our Troops
Good find.
BUMP!
So what’s the bottom line, in English: Does Kos have more members than we do? Do they have more traffic? Are their statistics inflated or just inaccurate because of the method used or ??? Thanks.
Their stats are faked, but their BS is real...
It could also be attributed to the usage of multiple tab browsers, like NetCaptor, for instance. Every time you open the browser, the same sites you visited pop up again if you set the options up that way. I have several sites that I keep in my browser for quick and easy access.
25+ years in the computer business here, and all I can do to rightfully address this is to quote the old saw: “Lies, damned lies......and statistics.”
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