A VC - Latest Comments in Where My Traffic Comes From

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

M Sharma — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:57:12 -0000

Fred - great post. I have a theory about why blogs of similar interest like techcrunch do not generate that much traffic to your blog. The explanation might lie in the similarity.

Since I am interested in Technology, Entrepreneurship, and VC, I am subscribed to most of the usual suspects like GigaOm, TC, your blog, etc, and go through them via Google reader. If I find a link to one of your posts on, say TC - there are a couple of possibilities why I might not click that link:

1. I have already read the post
2. I will get to your blog and read the post as I make my way through the subscriptions

Just a thought - perhaps this is deflating the number of referrals from sites that appeal to the same target audience.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:40:02 -0000

Best comment of the day!

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

Obbop — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:58:21 -0000

The vast majority of my traffic comes from festish sex porn sites that cater to midgets, tri-sexuals and fixations with small furry mammals.

I don't understand this at all.

My site is geared towards conservative Republican values.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:50:02 -0000

I had the quantcast tag on my page for about a year and I took it off maybe
six months ago because the data made no sense to me. Maybe I was doing
something wrong. I have a link to my sitemeter stats on the left rail of my
blog. That seems to work fine for me and others. all of gawker media stats
are shown that way on nick denton's blog

http://www.nickdenton.org/0...

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

ppearlman — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:25:11 -0000

a concrete example of how much deterioration my.yahoo has experienced over the course of only one year at the expense of iggogle et al...

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

Robert Seidman — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:53:50 -0000

Hmmm. I think it depends on whether you're "quantified" or not. If you're not, (which you're not) and they are relying on panel data, yeah, at least for the smaller sites, the panel data does seem to suck (but I imagine that's true on almost any panel).

But if you're Quantified, at least on a visits, unique, and pageview basis, Quantcast tracks almost exactly with GA. It tracks at least as closely as feedburner does. I don't love the presentation of it's demographic data but for measuring the traffic itself, it's very good.

I'll grant there are some presentation/UI issues, but if you look at daily traffic (instead of 30 day or 7 day trends), it's pretty spot-on.To compare it to Alexa for a site that actually is quantified is insulting.

It's definitely NOT better than GA for the person running the site (but it's not trying to be that) because it doesn't list all the referral, keyword, and wealth of reports available on GA, but in terms of making your traffic stats totally open, if that's really what you're of a mind to do, it's great.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:28:03 -0000

Exactly

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:18:02 -0000

Howard

The problem with feedburner subs is they get stale. I have 115,000 feedburner subs. And yet when my subs were 15,000 the daily reach of my feed was around 2,000. Now its about 4,000. So my feed readers have doubled and yet my subs have gone up 8x

The feed sub number is like the facebook installed apps number. Basically useless

Fred

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 08:42:02 -0000

Quantcast's data sucks. It makes no sense to me. I prefer google analytics, sitemeter, feedburner, even alexa if you can believe it

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 08:41:02 -0000

So true. And office safe too

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

Hank Williams — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 08:20:02 -0000

Thanks. I do use feedburner, and it is indeed helpful. I guess my blog is
new enough that the daily reach and the subscriber numbers are pretty close
and at this point I dont think I have almost any bogus subs. Currently the
number of daily readers is much higher than my subscribers or reach. I guess
over time it sounds like that dynamic will change. What I was trying to
figure out is are there metrics for how many "conversions" one can typically
expect out of a batch of uniques that will become subscribers. My *tiny*
sample suggests in my case about 1%, which I am pretty happy with. But I was
just curious if that was good or bad my comparison. It probably depends on
where you are in the lifecycle of your blog too I would guess.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

Offbeatmammal — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 02:51:28 -0000

that's good new because it means FriendFeed is (I guess) introducing a new audience to the social networking world.
digging into my (much, much) smaller pool of data actually bears that out... I have FriendFeed followers who are not Twitter followers... they came from Facebook.
Kinda comforting to see it's NOT a zero sum game as I first suspected it might be

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

howardlindzon — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:53:04 -0000

I am interested to see the relationship between Feedburner subscribers and Twitter Followers for any correlation as to early adoption and success. For instance, I liked reading Gaping Void dude for a time, until he twittered and once I saw how he twittered I lost interwst in everything he did. I think some people are meant to twitter, some blog, some both and some just to read :)

To start this conversation off I have 3400 feedburner subscribers and 530 or so twitter followers for a ratio of 6 ish to 1. I like twittering better for finance and blogging now for other stuff.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

RacerRick — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:51:04 -0000

Love to see your top 10 from "network location".

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

howardlindzon — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:48:20 -0000

Have you read "The Open Kamona' by Seymour Hair :) . Oy.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

Robert Seidman — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 21:54:17 -0000

That is a great line and it's true, but you're not making (the bulk of) your money via advertising on your blog.

I had some e-mail correspondence recently with some folks about NewTeeVee.Com's page view traffic because I could see it via Quantcast. The result of that seems to be that Quantcast now only has that level of detail for all of the GigaOm empire rolled up (as opposed to pageview detail on the individual sites). So it's still "open", but not as granular.

The interesting info is actually in the details sometimes.. But, I don't blame GigaOm at ALL for making that change. Nor would I expect you to post your pageview detail or pages per visit simply because I'm curious, but it wouldn't break my heart if you "Quantified" your blog leaving it all open to anyone who cares to look! They also have a way to report feed stats as well, though I've never played around with it.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

DonRyan — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 21:49:03 -0000

Google Analytics= Nerd Porn (I mean this in the best possible way!)

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

John Furrier — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:50:00 -0000

Thanks Fred. I'm a man of my word :-)

furrier.org blog did 18k uniques for the qtr around 6.5k per month ... i have no idea how many subscribers are hitting the feed.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:00:01 -0000

That's a great line

I can't think of one time in the past fice years where I've regretted being open

Fred

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:58:01 -0000

That's not what my data shows

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

Jauder Ho — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:37:03 -0000

Fred,

If you could post your stats breakdown from FeedBurner, that would be interesting to see and compare.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

chartreuse — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:29:59 -0000

i was one of those folks completely confused by rss. the words involved were too long (aggregator) and completely foreign.

Now Reddit I love. It's (unfortunately) what I am reading while all my friend are on Techmeme. I remember when Reddit was bought by Conde Nast a couple of ears ago for a song. As a long time user of it it seems they didn't touch it at all (except to slap some unobtrusive ads on it).

But back to th topic at hand. I think its cool that you let people know this stuff.

It's interesting.

I am currently working with a fairly large site and we were discussing their stats. I advised them to open their stats up to everyone.

They freaked and talked about stuff like competition knowing, etc. My answer was the standard "So?".

They didn't have a reply. From now on I will use the line I heard waiting for the train today. "Don't be scared. Be scary."

I know you didn't post this stuff to scare people but being open is surely more interesting. A great read.

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

Offbeatmammal — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:27:08 -0000

it's amazing how fast FriendFeed has grown as a referrer, almost catching up Twitter (and I suspect mostly at the expense of Twitter)

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:10:33 -0000

i just checked google and it was 83k for the past 30 days

Re: Where My Traffic Comes From

fredwilson — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:00:02 -0000

Everything is overrated unless it's unknown