Friday, January 25, 2013

More blogging lessons learned

Some numbers after passing 1000 page hits.

In the run up to the magic number of 1000 pageviews, we paid attention to usage statistics.
Three primary observations are, in our opinion, worth noting.

1)  Nobody reads your blogger profile
Okay, "nobody" is exaggerated, but with way under half of one  percent of the number of views, you may just want to save yourself the effort.

Since you probably haven't read the profile, we repeat one statement here:  we at the K-landnews do not track you, we like you in all your anonymous glory.

2) Work hours and late nights
People seem to like reading our blog at work and late at night.  If you are an employer, do not discourage this. Your employees are happier and more productive after an uplifting read.

3) The current month is where you get the views
Live in the moment applies to blogs as well, it appears. The posts of the current month get the views. Once all these titles you painstakingly nurtured and polished fold under the "<LastMonthName> (#ofPosts)" item, they hardly attract any more eyes.
Our blog is still young, but for November and December, our ballpark share of views for posts from the previous month is below 5 percent.

What's the deal with real and fake Pageviews?
Those pageviews are not all real page views, where a person sits in front of a screen and reads your stuff.
Everybody in the software industry knows how difficult it is to get a true count of the number of times your pages have been viewed. The software packages used to get those numbers as well as most favorite pages, the origin of your visits, and the like fall under the "analytics" category. All packages come with a disclaimer telling you the the numbers you get from different packages will invariable be different.

A big source of "not real" page views are automated readers and "scrapers".
You will see hits from several "stats" websites, like vilainstats or uglystats. Do not click on them. These guys generate traffic to their sites in this manner, and the sites have zero "content".

Our estimate of fake "views" from sites like this is about 10%.

Then there are other automated views from sites that take your posts to generate "content", which in turn generates traffic for them and ad revenue.  
We have not been able to quantify these in a very reliable manner because the source displayed in the analytics program does not match the website address where a post ends up.
Nevertheless, we peg the number of posts used by scrapers at no more than 3 percent.

Displayed number of pageviews - 20% looks like a more realistic number.

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