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An Imperfect Blog Ranking
By Greg L | 3 February 2007 | Blogs | 4 Comments
I’ve found that a fair number of Virginia political blogs have taken advantage of sitemeter, which provides website traffic statistics, and went through Waldo’s blogroll and the BNN listing to see who has sitemeter and what traffic is being reported for these sites. Sitemeter isn’t a perfect gauge of the popularity of a site, as it won’t record a visit if someone disables graphics and/or javascript, or otherwise blocks the display of the sitemeter graphic. There are also a lot of prominent sites that don’t use sitemeter, which leaves some important gaps in the analysis. But it does provide to some degree an objective way to rank political blogs in Virginia, in a “build it and they will come” kind of way.
So here’s a list of the top ten sites that use sitemeter, and the traffic they get, based on page views this past week, and with the average page views per day:
| Rank | Blog Name | Page Views This Week | Average Per Day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Not Larry Sabato | 43,654 | N/A* |
| 2 | Raising Kaine | 38,145 | 5,449 |
| 3 | QandO | 31,287 | 4,470 |
| 4 | Black Velvet Bruce Li | 11,722 | 1,675 |
| 5 | NoVATownHall | 11,241 | 6,195 |
| 6 | Bacon’s Rebellion | 6,089 | 870 |
| 7 | Bearing Drift | 5,079 | 726 |
| 8 | Waldo Jaquith | 4,211 | N/A* |
| 9 | VA Progressive | 2,530 | 361 |
| 10 | Richmond Democrat | 1,928 | 275 |
Here are some others worth mention:
| Blog Name | Page Views This Week | Average Per Day |
|---|---|---|
| 750 Volts | 1,664 | 238 |
| Below The Beltway | 1,624 | 232 |
| Skeptical Observer | 1,234 | 176 |
| Spark It Up | 1,260 | 180 |
| Rocinate’s Burdens | 625 | 89 |
I compared my Google adsense statistics with sitemeter, and adsense reported 14,776 hits for Black Velvet Bruce Li for the same period, compared to sitemeter’s metric of 11,722. My server logs reported 25,660 page requests in the last seven days, which would include web crawlers and other non-user traffic. So it might seem as if sitemeter isn’t catching all the traffic for sites, and may understate traffic by a little bit, but it doesn’t seem to be entirely off. If it’s off consistently by the same factor for everyone, it’s still a pretty decent apples-to-apples way to compare sites.
It’s by no means a perfect means of ranking blogs, but at least there’s some objectivity in this methodology. For those of you not using sitemeter, here’s a good reason to do so.
UPDATE: NLS points out we can get weekly data from blogads for himself and Waldo. The tables have been updated with this new data.
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4 Comments
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I suspect that all measures of mere numbers are imperfect. I once expressed some dismay at my number of hits to an elected public official. And while I recognize that the response was perhaps in the nature of what that official thought I wanted to hear, the comment was in the nature of “Yeah, but that doesn’t reflect WHO is reading it, and I suspect that the identity of your readership is something in which you can take pride.”
James, I agree that the “quality” of the readers, and for that matter, the quality of the content are probably more important than raw eyeballs, but it’s terrifically subjective to rate on that basis. A geek like me enjoys applying hard data when it’s available, subject to the conclusions that data can conclusively support.
I researched at least 30 blogs where I found data, and listed not even half of them. I think it’s pretty significant that you nearly made the top ten considering that you post far less frequently than some that I cited. Perhaps on a readers per post basis, which might start to address the quality issues, you’d rank pretty highly. Consider that RK posts about 15 times a day in order to generate the readership they get, and you post about five a week.
Greg, I was making no claims as to quality; I was only commenting on the data. I’m not sure there’s any measure that is perfect, considering the wide range of individual goals that people have for their blogs (or even for individual posts within those blogs), and the interplay between readership and those goals. In fact, I’m pretty sure that there IS no perfect measure. However, you seem to know a little more about my blog than I do (five times a week?).
And while I appreciate your comments, I note that I still got beaten on raw numbers by a teenager.
I do wonder, however, whether this rates an upgrade on Ben’s blogroll.