Saturday, 11 July 2009

Ryan's Stats with Caveats

Ryan Cullen this morning published a look at the clicks out of the fabulous LibDemBlogs. It was inspired by the recent navel gazing following the June Wikio rankings coming out. However he did post some important caveats.


There are some major caveats in the stats:

a) these are clicks from LibDemBlogs.co.uk, this doesn’t include people who use the RSS feed, those who have sites in their own RSS feed readers/aggregators, sites which are accessed via bookmarks or those linked from other bloggers.
b) I only checked the “top” 50 blogs, as the current method needs me to enter each url in to the MyBlogLog one by one, and wait for the results. This means that a long tail blog could have been missed.
c) Those who post lots will have more clicks to their sites, this doesn’t mean that they are more popular.



So I got to thinking especially as I was quite shocked that my last appearance in the Golden Dozen was actually as one of the first seven on clicks through (I normally have to make the list through nomination). So I took a look at my blogs Google Analytics for sources.






You know I wasn't really surprised, it has been a while since every day LibDemBlogs and LDV dominate my statporn. As you can see LDBs is between about 12-15% indeed for the year so far it accounts for 13.3% of my hits, add on LBV at around the 6% mark and less than 1 in 5 of my hits from the big two central Lib Dem sources. As you can see in May I have a big bump from Google, I actually featured on their news feeds on a number of days that month. The same has happened on MSN and Yahoo News feeds in the past.



Over the last two weeks I've also had a lot of hits coming through Google Images, this is solely down to a good choice in the hours after Michael Jackson died and actually being a more influential global source than the source I lifted it from. My readership is definitely not solely or even largely Lib Dems that is a good realm of influence. So while it is good to get plaudits from inside the party that isn't the be all and end all, nor the main reason why I blog.

Update: Of course no sooner do I post this than a mention on Iain Dale's Daley Dozen shifts things dramatically overnight.

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