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 ...
You mean that a Lefist lied about something? Say it ain’t so!
I honestly don't know. I do know that in late 2005 there were a lot of people banned here for various reasons. That would account for the shift. Others have mentioned that not using IE as a browser and spyware blockers could skew the results.
I’ve heard it claimed that Markos (”Kos”) is a military veteran. Does anyone know the facts on this?
I am so stealing that.
Daily Kos Estimated Monthly Uniques - 262,944
Free Republic Estimated Monthly Uniques - 892,515
Quantcast provides reasonably reliable statistics, similar to Neilson and others, as opposed to easily corrupted stats that supposedly count page visits like SiteMeter does.
In other words, if you are an advertiser looking to spend money on web advertising, you would go to someplace like Quantcast; if you are running a website and want to get an idea of your stats, you go to your server logs. If you're too stupid to read/analyze your server logs, you put a page counter on your website. Page hit counters were funny in 1997.
I can't count the ways in which page hit counters are useless.
See post #27. I didn’t know this, either.
That is fascinating. Thanks for the valuable information.
Phony website, phony soldiers, what do you expect? I wonder if anybody will pick this up.
I’ve heard that Moulitsas’ score of 83 on an IQ test was inflated 60% as well.
if Kos uses clicks for advertising then the advertisers should care.
If the advertisers do not care then there is an element of fraud. it would be similar to using a restaurant to launder illegal crime money.
If an advertiser is using fake clicks to pump money into kos in exchange for certain stories being emphasised or positions being taken then there has to be a campaign fraud there.
>>>It’s a picture of dogs wearing helmets.
The leader of the pack.
Yeah, if you have to us IE to get the stats, then the many, many people here on FR that use Firefox wouldn’t be counted.....thanks!
Add one more FireFox user to the count of missing Freepers ...
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