22 December 2008

TYWKIWDBI - State of the Blog


On this one-year anniversary it's time to update the data for those few family and old friends who have been visiting TYWKIWDBI and following its progress since its birth.

Technorati tracks the number of other blogs that have linked to this one- the"authority" rank - widely perceived as a principal measure of a blog's success. At six months our authority was 9, with a rank of 660,000. By ten months those numbers had increased to 27 and 250,000. The current authority is 33, placing us at about the 118,000th spot in the blogosphere (out of approximately 112 million blogs).

Google Analytics provides me with additional metrics, principally focusing on the traffic to this site and where visitors come from (but be reassured, nothing that allows me to track anyone individually). The traffic data is summarized in the image above, which shows a one-year period on the X-axis and the number of unique visitors per day on the Y-axis. To date 50,000 unique visitors have paid 65,000 visits lasting only about 2 minutes each on average to view 2 pages. In recent weeks, the blog has seen about 500-600 visitors/day (the jaggedness of the curve reflects predictable drops on weekends when people presumably aren't at work wasting time surfing the 'net).

In my best judgment, the TYWKIWDBI viewership probably consists of a "core" of a few dozen who visit daily and another 50-100 who come probably 2X/week (the presidential preference poll garnered about 100 votes) and scroll all the way down the home page to where they left off the time before.

The other several hundred/day appear to be people who have found the blog via Google searches for "dog rescues dog" or "wood on Mars" or "Eric Clapton" - they view that page, perhaps click to the home page and leave. Visitors come primarily from English-speaking nations (U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia are the top four), then from Europe and Japan, but the total number of countries has now reached 162, and I'm surprised (and pleased) to see that a couple hundred have made it past the legendary "Chinese firewall" that supposedly blocks all access to blogspot blogs for residents in China.

Since TYWKIWDBI is a noncommercial site, none of these data "matter" in any significant way; they don't influence my decisions on what to blog. The general pattern is favorable, however, and it does encourage me to keep slogging along doing what I'm doing - as long as both the viewers and I are having fun and learning stuff.

4 comments:

  1. I visit your blog daily, and like it very much. You post some interesting things I don't find elsewhere.

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  2. Great work. I doubt my blog will churn out 50,000 visits in its first year.

    You definitely have a lot of interesting things to share. I'm glad to have stumbled across your blog. Keep up the good work.

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  3. I'm one of those who show up here semi-daily. I found it through a link from one of the other blogs I read. You have one of the more interesting blogs that I've found. It's well written, interesting and insightful. Thanks for doing it!

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  4. I'll just say "ditto" to the first 3 comments.

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