July 16, 2003
A View from the Top of the Blogosphere
The following chart shows the relationship between actual and predicted traffic for the top 25 blogs in N.Z. Bear's sample. For background, see here.
I've excluded from this sample the statistics for the site Detling House Memories, as I've been unable to verify the Sitemeter statistic and the visit-to-link ratio of 3,600 seems out-of-whack. If this exclusion is justified, I will need to re-do the numbers below to reflect this change. Argh! (N.Z. Bear?).
The sites for which the blue line tops the grey line are, in my parlance, "readers' blogs." Those in the opposite situation are "bloggers' blogs."
Interesting stuff all around.
I'd note, too, that a couple of the high-traffic blogs aren't really "blogs" in the normal sense, anyway. Gizmodo is the most obvious outlier. It's basically a tech resource site using blogging format. So, it's not likely to get a lot of linkage, because it's not what most people post on.
Posted by: James Joyner at 09:05 AMYeah, I thought about dropping Gizmodo from the analysis, but could come up with no systematic way to separate "real blogs" from "sorta blogs" without actually reading them all.
Then again, I did remove my Blogs around the U.S.A. post that someone was kind enough to add to the Ecosystem.
Posted by: Oscar Jr. at 09:19 PMWith Bear's Ecosystem back up, I compared my links to traffic ratings. TAM ranks 206 traffic-wise but 437th when it comes to links. Does that qualify me as a "reader's blogger?" Let me note that most days my biggest referrer is bookmarks.
Posted by: Sean Hackbarth at 03:49 AMSean:
You are, indeed, a "readers' blogger." As of July 7, you were getting about 47 more visits per day than would be predicted giving the number of inbound links to, and the age of, your site.
Posted by: Oscar Jr. at 07:42 PM
