In a comment to the post below, Dean Esmay wrote:
I believe I have found a profound error in Truth Laid Bear's site statistics ranking which may render your data questionable. I'm going to write something up about it tonight.
Dean's thoughtful post is now up here.
He identifies as a possible issue the fact that Sitemeter only counts traffic to pages on which its code is placed. In his case, he only included the code on his main page (i.e., not on his individual or archived pages). He notes that, due to this, Sitemeter failed to count 63% of his traffic.
If many of the other sites included also count only visits to their main page, this could have the effect of skewing the analysis. As a quick check, I chose 10 blogs at random from the sample and checked whether Sitemeter was included on their archive pages. In all 10 cases, they were. (This is hardly dispositive, but I do have to get to work.) Thus, if this sample is representative, the traffic-counting issue may be less of a problem than Dean feared.
Dean also wrote:
His analysis is interesting, because he believes there are some blogs which are "blogger's blogs" (mainly only read by other bloggers) versus "popular blogs" that are read more by the masses. Unfortunately, while I am certain there is some truth to this, I'm not convinced we have enough data to be basing any firm conclusions upon.
I would characterize "bloggers' blogs" and "readers' blogs" slightly differently. The former, like my site, are relatively over-linked given their readership, the latter, relatively under-linked. (Alternatively, the former are relatively under-read given the generosity of their linkers...) Of late, most of my readers have been Google™ searchers rather than other bloggers. Not that I blame the other bloggers...
In any event, thanks to Dean Esmay for pointing out the issue and for linking to the analysis.
Update: James Joyner also has an unsurprisingly insightful post on the topic.
Posted by oscarjr at July 15, 2003 09:18 AM | TrackBack