Poliblog Perspective

I’m ready to be hoist by my own petard on this one, as it is an old story - but I haven’t seen it reported anywhere: the Guardian has started publishing a sectional breakdown of its traffic figures.

The Guardian has started breaking its web traffic figures down by the various sections of its website: News, Arts, Blogs, Books, Business, Comment is Free, Education, Environment, Film, Football, Life and Style, Media, Money, Music, Observer, Politics, Science, Society, Sport, Technology, Travel.

So now blogs in each of these niches can start to make some interesting comparisons.

The numbers have been published as part of the advertising offer for the Guardian.

Overall Guardian September Figures

Worldwide Totals

Worldwide Page Impressions: 208,701,946
Worldwide Monthly unique users: 24,186,422

UK Page Impressions: 93,244,526
Worldwide Monthly unique users: 8,972,467

These Worldwide figures are generated from the monthly audit of Guardian logfiles by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (Electronic) .

Detailed Section Totals

Here are the detailed numbers for August and September.

August Detailed Figures.

September Detailed Figures.

This detailed data is generated by Generated by Omniture, who are totally reputable. The data is generated from a Javascript snippet in each page, which means that the figures are (very roughly - my guess would be to allow a tolerance of perhaps +/- 20%) comparable with Google Analytics figures. My detailed comments are below the fold.

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I’ve posted a couple of times recently about the Slugger Awards, and the Slugger O Toole blog.

Here’s a nugget to chew on which throws some light on why Slugger is further integrated into the local political process than any other blog in the country: Slugger’s penetration of it’s local market is up to five times higher than any other site (to my knowledge, anyway).

A note on numbers: I am making the comparison by comparing Unique Visitors (representing how many individual computers have visited the website) for the largest political site in a country (England, Wales etc.) with the population of the Local Market. It’s not a perfect comparison, since the percentage of blog traffic from outside the locality (country) varies, but it is good enough for this broad conclusion.

Site / Absolute Uniques per Month / Population / “Market Penetration”

• Northern Ireland: Slugger O Toole ( 23,000 ) vs 1.75 million = 1.3%.
• Scotland: Mr Eugenides (~15-16,000 ) vs 5.2 million = 0.3%.
• (*) Wales: Ordovicius (~6-10,000) vs 2.9 million = 0.3%.
• England: Guido Fawkes (110,000) vs 51 million = 0.2%.

(*) In Wales there are several blogs at roughly the same level.

I’m not claiming huge accuracy for these figures, but the difference is startling even if my numbers are some way off. The sources are all from hosted web counter services.

It looks as though Slugger may have crossed several thresholds the others have not yet reached for an independent political site, and that - combined with the fact that it is 6 years old, nonpartisan and is read (for example) by nearly all Northern Ireland Parliamentarians - may account for the site’s ability to impact in some broader way on the political process itself.

This is a broad brush thesis and I am open to comment / correction.

Wrapping Up

I’d be interested to see the comparative local figures for English regional political sites - such as The Stirrer (Birmingham).

Following on from my article about changes to Wikio rankings, the update has now happened.

The Wardman Wire is number 13 amongst UK Politics Blogs, and 26 amongst all UK Blogs - based on editorial links in from blogs monitored by Wikio over the previous 9 months.

There is more detail in the previous article, but my headlines all hold with minor changes, except that Nick Robinson is still in the Top 20.

2. Liberal Conspiracy is now number 3 (which puts it at no 7 in the rankings for “All UK Blogs”).
3. LibDem Voice is now ahead of Labour Home. Update: In Top 10 for all UK blogs.
4. Nick Robinson’s BBC Politics Blog has dropped (just) out of the Top 20 behind some Independents. Update: Still in Top 20 Politics Blogs.
5. Dizzy Thinks is at number 18 (now 16), having appeared from nowhere in the politics rankings last time.
6. The Wardman Wire is now number 14 (now 13) (18 under the previous system). Chicken Yoghurt has also advanced.
7. If Normblog were in the “Politics” not the “Other” category it would be in the Top 5 (now Top 6) in this list

That is assuming, of course, that you care about this stuff.

I normally don’t trust Alexa further than I can throw Ken Clarke with a toy catapult, but …

That is a big enough change to be worth a look.

You can see the graph and other data here. I have some thoughts for tomorrow, but I’d be interested to hear other views first in the comments.

A real Friday post. The website bankaholic.com has been sold for $15m.

From Paidcontent.org:

Financial info site BankRate is expanding its financial product listings, as it’s acquiring Bankaholic, which provides info on deposits, savings accounts, and money market accounts. The company will pay $12.4 million up front, with another $2.5 million possible earnout over the next 12 months. Bankaholic’s sole employee John Wu will assist in the transition and remain for an unspecified period of time.

Interesting points

• The blog is built on Wordpress.
• It is run by a single person - Johns Wu, and has been purchased by bankrate.com.
• The traffic is not *that* high, which tells us something about the value of financial niche markets.
• The blog is relatively new (the domain was first registered in 2006).

Bankaholic Traffic

This is the graph of estimated traffic over the last two years from Quantcast.

I didn’t get into the arguments about whether leading blogs were worth £1m after Labour Home was sold for £50k.

As a note to those on the Blogger platform - the question is tangential in the short term since the 2 key leading blogs (Dale, Fawkes) are on Blogger, and the Blogger terms of use include this clause:

7. No Resale of the Service. Unless expressly authorised in writing by Google, you agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes (a) any portion of the Service, (b) use of the Service or (c) access to the Service.

Clearly they aren’t so stringent as to go after people with advertising, however I don’t think people will get away with selling anything as an asset.

The solution to that is to move it to Wordpress and take the short term (usually 3-6 month) hit in traffic and profile. That can be very painful, as Unity can testify (and many others).

And that is all a very good reason why being on Blogger is a bad long term idea, unless you are aware of the tradeoffs (and Guido is on the ball enough that he probably is).

I suppose that blog revenues can be securitised - maybe they will be part of the flight to safety.

One of the interesting ways that Google seems to work is that new websites (or new articles for that matter) have a “period in the sun” to see if they will become heavily linked; they then vanish and may come back to prominence later.

One corollary of that, and of the way the internet works, is that most traffic to blogs usually comes through two routes:

a) Brand new articles.
b) Old archived articles.

In the case of the Wardman Wire, perhaps 75-80% of our traffic comes via the archives, rather than via either the Magazine Front Page or the Traditional Blog version.

Study of Top Articles on the Wardman Wire

I did a study of traffic from a 30 day period in Jan-Feb this year, eight out the top ten most visited articles were more than 4 months old, and none were between one and three months old. I thought it worth reposting a part of the study, before I repeat the exercise in the autumn.

Here’s the summary:

These are the ages of the top 12 posts in months, from top to bottom:

* 5 months
* 10 months
* 4 months
* Two weeks
* 5 months
* 5 months
* 10 months
* 10 months
* 4 months
* 8 months
* Two weeks
* 6 months

i.e., posts take time to mature, and archives are very, very important. Go back to your blog and make your archives easily accessible for users and search engines - it matters to the gradual growth of your blog. Have a look at how many ways in to the archives there are on www.mattwardman.com.

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Introduction

The Open Directory (wikipedia article) is a human-edited directory of categorised websites, which has long been treated as an authoritative directory. Traditionally, it is a place to have your website listed to establish favourable rankings in web searches.

The site has lost some of it’s reputation over the last few years - due to alleged partiality by editors - but it is still one way of looking at the internet presence of UK political parties over time.

In this article I’m going to look at how the presence of how the presence of the UK Party Political websites have developed on the Open Directory since 2000. I’ve looked at the UK Political Parties category, and how it has developed since 2000 - taking the first Internet Archive Snapshot of each year (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, no data available for 2005, 2006 and 2007 ).

If you are interested in a “softer” angle, and a look at how listings in sites such as the Open Directory and Wikipedia help get the attention of the internet public, then you should look at my Blog Platform column for Sunday March 23rd tomorrow over on the Wardman Wire.

Overall Totals of UK Party Political Websites

Overall Totals

Note the absence of data in the Internet Archive for 2005. Still - pretty much the trend we would expect as the use of the web has become mainstream.

Total Number of Websites by Party

This graph shows the trends up until the middle of 2007. As of March 2008, the totals for March 2008 are: Labour 493, Tory 594, Lib Dem 695. My reflections:

• How did a much smaller party (Lib Dems) get almost half as many again party affiliated websites listed as the larger Labour Party? There are two possibilities - they either have more websites getting “natural” listings or they are being publicised more effectively or more strategically. I think it is the latter, but we cannot tell whether there is a centrally driven “directory listing” campaign, or a highly aware set of webmasters (perhaps encouraged by workshops at Conference etc).
• The Lib Dems (and to a lesser extent the Tories) clearly had some sort of website creation, or website listing, “internet push” around 2005 - the time of the last election. The trend continuing into 2008 indicates that the Tories seem to have “relaxed” while the Lib Dems have “kept on trucking”.
• To my mind, the Lib Dems are quite effective at targeted Internet campaigning - both around raising awareness of particular issues, but also in taking a long-term, strategic approach. To explain why I’d point to three factors: firstly, it is easier to mobilise and maintain that mobilisation in a smaller body; secondly, a smaller group has less resources - and internet promotion in more or less free; thirdly, the Lib Dems have a greater tradition of prioritising the local - and all this can be done by local activists; finally, the Lib Dems seem (to me) to have a tighter co-ordination between the central Organisation and the web-activists - and a stability in the way the two have worked together over 5 to 10 years.

Whatever the reason, these numbers are quite impressive, and the Tories and Labour have some catching up to do.

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Now that I have the links between my different websites in place, I have been looking at the amount of traffic being generated over the last month, and the most popular articles.

Total Raw Traffic

On this occasion I’ve processed all the raw log files using the free version of a utility called Deep Log Analyser, rather than relying on the data generated by a Wordpress Plugin.

However, once caveat is that at least 4 of the sites (those which aggregate Parliamentary blogs - www.senedd.me.uk, www.holyrood.me.uk, www.europarl.me.uk and www.parliament.me.uk) are all less than a week old. So I have had to include some judicious estimates in the figures.

Another difference is that certain files that are not part of the Wordpress installation are included in the numbers. The raw total of page impressions is 376,000 across all the 13 sites (the twelve in the toolbar and www.mattwardman.co.uk). More than half of these relate to www.mattwardman.com.

The Impact of Files that shouldn’t count

These are the top 5 files listed for www.mattwardman.com and what they are:

Page Views - Filename - What is it?

1. 14,880 Page Views. polls-js.php.

   This is used for in page polls which are refreshed without reloading the page. This should be excluded.

2. 14,452 Page Views. podpress_js.php

   Part of the Podpress wordpress plugin. Not actually used on this blog. I should really find a way to exclude this.

3. 13,872 Page Views. /blog/feed/index.php

   This is the home page for the RSS feed. This could be included or excluded depending on which statistics I am interested in.

4. 11,747 Page Views. clickmanager.cgi

   This is the redirector programme “bounced off” when I need to count clicks on a link. This indicates 11,747 clicks on links in 30 days. I use it, for example, to count the clicks on the toolbar (hover over a button and see the “double” web address), and the clicks on stories in the Daily Roundup. This should be excluded.

5. 10,710 Page Views. /blog/index.php

   At last one that counts. This is the Blog home page. It counts for very few impressions out of the total. I will return to this - it is a sign of how important blog archives are for attracting traffic.

So - just to exclude 4 of these top 5 reduces the traffic to www.mattwardman.com by roughly 50,000 page impressions over the raw log files. Counting from inside Wordpress are cleaner, but still have a lot of “gunge” in the data.

So what is a Reasonable Total?

I am happy to quote a total number of page impressions for this 30 day period of “around 250,000” - a reduction of a third. But having done that - 250,000 page impressions in a month on a set of sites that are mainly only 8 months old is OK.

The figure for the main www.mattwardman.com site is around 130,000-140,000 page impressions (with approximately another 30,000 or so for www.mattwardman.co.uk). These figures themselves roughly tally with the numbers given by the Slimstat-EX Wordpress plugin (140,000 and 35,000 respectively - also probably containing some search crawling).

The Real Top Ten Pages on www.mattwardman.com

After filtering out the noise, the following are the Top Twelve pages on the site in the last 30 days. Go and have a look at the links, and write down your conclusions - then read my notes below.

Page Views - Date - Title and Link

1. 3942 Page Views - 20070912 - In memory of free speech - Jesus and Mo - serious
2. 3825 Page Views - 20070501 - Double Trouble - Posh Spice and Ananova - humour, morning funny
3. 2130 Page Views - 20071010 - Wordpress Plugin - Category Images - tech tip
4. 1616 Page Views - 20080213 - ABC Rowan Firestorm was started by the BBC - serious analysis
5. 1422 Page Views - 20070904 - New Scottish Government launches official website - satirical
6. 1280 Page Views - 20070905 - This posting may contain nuts - serious but funny - health and safety series
7. 998 Page Views - 20070404 - Double Trouble - Guido Fawkes and Zorro - humour, morning funny
8. 995 Page Views - 20070411 - Double Trouble - Morgan Lifecar and Thomas the Tank Engines - humour, morning funny
9. 849 Page Views - 20071016 - Lib Dem leadership contest to replace Ming Campbell - humour, Lib Dems = box of ferrets
10. 817 Page Views - 20070609 - Video Game Battle between Sony and Church of England - serious analysis
11. 812 Page Views - 20080211 - Britblog Roundup - Ideas for Avoiding the Archbishop - serious
12. 709 Page Views - 20070815 - Do Health and Safety Professionals Get too Much of a Kicking - serious - health and safety series

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RSS subscribers represent visitors who come back to your site repeatedly. I took a look at my statistics last night, and the Wardman Wire main site is up to about 130.

Here are a couple of diagrams from Feedburner relating to the Wardman Wire. RSS subscribers tend to build over extended periods of time - the Devil, for example, who has been blogging for 3 years or so, currently has just under 700 subscribers.

This is the gradual buildup:

Note that I didn’t implement feedburner until June 2007.

Tags: RSS subscribers, visitors to ww, matt wardman, really simple syndication, number crunching

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