Page Views & Visits & Flame Wars

oh my!

A note about Docudharma site traffic.

This data is updated real-time and can always be found on our SiteMeter account.  Browse the links on the sidebar to get daily, monthly, & yearly reports of Visits and Page Views and other cool information.    The little green/white icon in the lower right corner of our page provides access to the SiteMeter stats.      

Here’s a screen shot of traffic on a monthly basis since we turned on the SiteMeter service.

07/26/07 @ 3 PM Pacific

The yellow bars and data in the table represent the number of visitors to the site.  Site Meter defines a “visit” as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes between page views.   The 30 minutes is significant.  It means that if you visit the site, leave for more than 30 minutes (or at least don’t click on any other pages) and then come back, that will count as another unique visit.   This means one person can generate multiple visits per day.      

The orange bars and data in the table represent the number of page views.  This is what is also referred to as hits.  A visitor generates a hit for every page they load in the docudharma.com domain.       Each time you click our home page or read or edit an essay or change your profile settings, etc. counts as a page view.  

From the graphic you can see that after the initial novelty wore off and Armando left in  Dec., our visits & views have been pretty consistent month over month.  

Average Visits and Views for January – June 2008

Visits = 23,222  

Views = 222,599    

Keep in mind that when you are looking at the July data, the month is not yet complete.  We still have 5-1/3 days left in this month.   I took these screen captures around 3 PM Pacific so there are still 9 hours of stats left to accumulate.   SiteMeter is running on Pacific time.  

So Far…

July 1-26, 2008

Visits = 16,800

Views = 192,206

Here’s a screen shot of the Summary stats over the lifetime of our blog.  Note the avg. daily visits and page views: 599 and 7654, respectively.

If we extrapolate to the end of July using the avgs. these are what the final numbers might look like:

Visits = 16,800 + (5.3 x 599) = 19,974

Views (Hits) = 192,206 + (5.3 x 7654) = 232,722

So while it is true that Visits will be below avg, the page hits should be a bit higher than avg.   The decline in visits could be due to people leaving the blog, or from seasonal activity, or dependant on a variety of other social-political factors. During the Primary Wars on DKos we received a lot of visitors looking for refuge.  Maybe they have gone back.    We also get visitor surges when our pages get picked up by reddit, Stumble, Digg, etc.   One of pinche tejano’s goofy essays got more than 2000 visits alone from Stumblers.    Seeing the visit numbers drop a few thousand in June & July doesn’t seem that significant – at least it’s too early to know if it’s a real trend or not.  

btw SoapBlox recently added the capability to put “Sharing” buttons on our Essays so we can take better advantage of those networking sites.  I will install that soon (after I get back from vacation).

Page Hits & Ad Revenue

On a related matter re: ad revenue being tied to page hits.  Page hits are not how we are paid for hosting the Google Ads.  People have to actually click those links in order for us to receive any benefit.  It’s usually worth a few pennies per click.   For the ads we run through BlogAds (top right corner and mid-column), we get very few of them to begin with.  The ones we do get are by virtue of being in the LBAN (Liberal Blog Ad Network), where advertisers will sometimes buy a network-wide ad.  I’m on the LBAN mail list and people have been saying the ads should pick up when the election gets closer.  So far we see no evidence of that – some have complained that Obama is ignoring the Netroots.   He only buys ads on Google and MSNBC, etc.     In any case, we charge a set price per week for these Ads so the number of views or clicks we get on them doesn’t really matter.  However, the prices we charge ($100/week Premium & $75/week Standard) are related to our weekly traffic stats.    The ad prices in relationship to all the other blogs in the network can be found here LBAN.   We set our prices similar to what other blogs with our traffic are getting.  I believe the only people really making money at this time are the top tier sites getting over 100,000 page views per week.  It’s always been that way.   Docudharma has never been at that level  We get 50-60K views per week.  I think we are doing really well for a young blog actually.  If you want to blow your mind look at the Daily Kos SiteMeter.   They avg almost 1 million Visits per day and more than 1 million page hits per day. They are also charging $15,000!!!/week for their Premium Blog Ad.  

The flame war effect.  

Sad but true – flame wars increase traffic.  At least for the short term.

This graph is from the SOTB earlier this year.   It shows that huge jump in traffic we had during the launch (I remember how awesome that was!).  The “Racism discussion” is the flame war that erupted with Armando and to some extent led to his departure last year. In February we were starting to see the effects of the Primary Wars at DKos.  

Some fresher data:

These are the visits & views from the Previous 30 Days (Jun 26 – Jul 26).  That spike of almost 14,000 hits occurred during the denouement of a flame war related to the current one.  June 30 was the day of pfiore8’s GBCW.  You can see the previous days were in the 9-10K range.  That’s well above our average.    To anyone worried about our traffic, by all means keep fighting.  No, I don’t really mean that –  just snarking!

I think that’s all I have to say on the subject.  If this is too much geek speak or you have any questions about other data you see on SiteMeter feel free to ask below.