I'm fascinated by the statistics of blogging. Who reads blogs? Why do they read blogs? Do blogs serve a useful purpose or are they just for fun? What's the future of blogging?
Part of the fascination is looking at the data to see which postings attract the most attention and how many people regularly check in each day. Are some blogs better than others? Are some blogs more popular? Why?1
A few minutes ago somebody logged on to Sandwalk to view a page and registered the one millionth page view since this blog began collecting data. That's pretty interesting. It means that Sandwalk is an average science blog in terms of popularity, far behind the best ones that have one million views per month.
One of the interesting things about science blogging is that there's a 25% dropoff in readers during the months of May, June, July, and August. (Other bloggers see this too.) I assume this is mostly students who don't read blogs during the summer. Is it because they only have high speed internet access when they're at school or is it because they're not interested in blogs during the summer?
1. I wonder if there's a direct correlation between the number of readers and the number of postings per day? Some blogs put up lots of articles every day even though many of those articles don't take much effort. Does this build readership so that when you post something important it's more likely to get attention? That doesn't work for me as a reader. There are quite a few excellent blogs that I scan every day even though the postings are infrequent. On the other hand, when I've tried posting several times a day over a period of a few weeks, the number of visits does increase significantly.
7 comments :
Well, you may be behind the blogs that get a million hits per month, but you're far ahead of the blogs that might reach a million hits sometime in the next few decades. Congratulations!
Thanks, but there really are lots of blogs out there that are much more popular. Some of them are very good.
There are also some blogs that don't get as many readers as Sandwalk but they are much better science blogs.
I'm content to be average. :-)
The best blogs are Canadian, and most of the blogs I do read are by Canadians. Bad Astronomy probably the best American blog I read.
Larry, do you know how you fair against the other Canadian bloggers?
"I wonder if there's a direct correlation between the number of readers and the number of postings per day?"
Hi Larry,
Yes, I suspect it has an impact. Personally, there are blogs I don't visit anymore because there was a new post like every 2 weeks or so.
I don't come here everyday because you don't necessarily post everyday, but I visit Pharyngula daily because Myers posts new articles daily. I don't think I'm the only one who does that.
Also, your blog is highly scientific (that's a compliment). Many of your posts are difficult to follow for a non scientist (like me) not because they are badly written - you write very well - but because the content requires scientific knowledge not everyone has.
But you should be very proud of being "average"! I mean my blog got 6 visitors last month, 1 of which was myself!! :0)
Robert M.
In terms of number of articles posted, this is one reason why I struggle to read Greg Laden's blog. He posts far too much stuff IMO; there's good material in there, but I usually can't be bothered wading through the rest. I reckon you've got the balance about right.
Nice!
You're still scanning blogs daily, rather than using an RSS feed reader? I use Google Reader but there are lots of other ones out there and it makes it much easier to keep up with new posts - especially on infrequently updated blogs.
cae says,
You're still scanning blogs daily, rather than using an RSS feed reader?
No, I didn't mean to imply that I don't use an aggregator.
I check feeds for 132 blogs every day.
Post a Comment