Originally posted 4/19. Reposted 4/20 after host failure.
Is there a case to be made that a rising tide of blog readership lifts all boats blogs?
Maybe. All I can do is add to the confusion by offering up a few Urchin figures for this odd, random, infrequently-updated, heavily-conversational blog.
Let’s look at average daily sessions and pageviews (noting that this blog isn’t updated once a day), and number of unique domains for the month, starting with the first month of the blog (April 2005) and using some representative months.
April 2005: 161 sessions/day, 275 pageviews/day, 689 visitors (domains)
July 2005: 226 sessions/day, 519 pageviews/day, 469 domains
October 2005: 453 sessions/day, 854 pageviews/day, 644 domains.
January 2006: 821 sessions/day, 1,856 pageviews/day, 908 domains.
March 2006: 1,064 sessions/day, 2,337 pageviews/day, 975 domains
April 1-17: 1,048 sessions/day, 2,601 pageviews/day, 736 domains so far
Given that W.a.r. provides full-text feeds, it’s fair to assume that most RSS readers only come to the blog when they’re commenting. Stuck at around 140 Bloglines subscribers, I continue to assume “around 600″ readership. But maybe actual readership is growing; maybe the overall tendency is up, at a moderate rate (the big jump came last fall, in November and December).
These are, of course, tiny numbers compared to Name Blogs even within liblogging. As they should be.
The most intriguing figure: 3,598 distinct domains in the one year and 17 days since this blog started.
That doesn’t compare to the 21,446 unique visitors to Cites & Insights between December 19, 2005 and March 31, 2006 (or the 87,336 unique visitors from 12/18/2002 to 1/6/06: 12/18/2002 is when C&I moved to Boise State from the now-defunct AT&T site). But it shouldn’t; I’d expect C&I to have about five to ten times the visitors/visits of W.a.r., and having 25+ times the distinct visitors (over several years) doesn’t surprise me.
Comments, if any, have been lost, and I didn’t attempt to restore hyperlinks. Note that these numbers are provided as additional information on how ordinary blog reading is increasing.
