I love stats & graphs: Top Blogs

I’ve been messing around with different web traffic stats sources, as I begin to look at the most influential bloggers. Blogs are starting to rival traditional sources of news and information, so from a public relations standpoint, it’s important to know where the loudest voices are, because maybe you can get them to spread your messages.

So I’ve been playing around with Alexa, a web monitoring tool owned by Amazon (and first result in a Google search of “web traffic”), and Compete, another web traffic monitor with some useful free features. Here are some graphical representations of the popularity of the Top 5 blogs (as ranked by Technorati).

This represents the number of unique visitors to each of these blogs in each month over the last year, which is one of many ways to gauge blog popularity. Currently, The Huffington Post is on top, followed by Gizmodo, Engadget, Tech Crunch, and Boing Boing. Technorati, which ranks blogs by their “authority,” or number of other blogs that link to them, has them ranked roughly the same, but with Tech Crunch in second place.

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Here’s the Alexa version of events, with the same websites, over roughly the same time period:
(Both Compete and Alexa have embed code, but I couldn’t get Alexa’s to work. Below is a screengrab.)

You’ll notice Alexa samples data much more frequently than Compete. It looks like Alexa samples every other day, whereas Compete samples twice a month. Also, the default Alexa data is “Daily Reach,” the percent of the internet population visiting the site in a day (so the numbers are low - under 0.5%). We also get a different ranking of blogs: Engadget, Gizmodo, Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, then Boing Boing. With Alexa, you can also look at traffic rankings (all of these rank below 200th), and daily page views as a percentage of internet traffic.

I bet Alexa is more comprehensive and powerful, but what I like about Compete is the access to a better variety of stats. Percentages are great, Alexa, but sometimes when percents are tiny numbers, I want to see gross numbers of unique visitors or visits:

Visits are the number of pageloads, so a single visitor can rack up a bunch of visits by him or herself. It looks like visits better correlate to Technorati’s ranking system. But unique visitors are often more important, especially to advertisers., because they each represent a new set of eyes and ears.

Another cool stat Compete provides is “Daily Attention,” the percentage of online time the average web user spends/wastes on a given website. Here are the attention stats for the top 5 blogs over the last month:

In this graph, the order is arbitrary. It’s the area taken up by each color that’s important. So not only does The Huffington Post get a lot of hits, but people actually stick around for awhile to read posts. So by looking at the first graph versus this one, even if Tech Crunch gets less unique visitors than Engadget per month, Tech Crunch users stick around longer. This also appears to be a good predictor of Technorati’s Authority ranking.

I want to leave you with a final graph: the Alexa “Reach” of this website, Media Socialist:

We’ll have to start working on that.

Posted in Blogs |
Tagged with Alexa, Amazon, Boing Boing, Compete, engadget, gizmodo, Google, graphs, public relations, tech crunch, Technorati, the huffington post, top, web traffic