Delivered to 15,000 Plainfield "doorsteps" Monday, Wednesday, Friday & Sunday

Monday, January 4, 2010

Plainfield blogs rank high on the Web




How big is the Web?


Plainfield's blog scene came in for a mention in Mark Spivey's end-of-year technology story last week (see here), leading me to check out how we rank on the Web.

The Plainfield blog scene is truly remarkable, with 16 identifiably authored blogs and counting (plus one more, if you include Bo Vastine -- who lives a couple of doors over the city line in Scotch Plains -- and who comments on the 22nd Legislative District, in which Plainfield is included).

When I told the presenter at a workshop on blogs for Rutgers journalism students some time back that Plainfield had (then) a dozen active blogs, he was amazed at the number. That was then, this is now.

One quibble with the Courier's copy editor (not with Mark, who does not write the headlines or section heads) is the heading 'COMPETING BLOGS'. I really think of us all as complementary, rather than competing. While several of us (Bernice, Olddoc, Piv, myself and the blogging Councilors) cover some of the same turf, each blog has its own voice and view and reading them all will give Plainfielders a pretty rounded view of what's going on in town.

Can we find out how Plainfield's blogs stack up as masters of the (Web) universe?

Kinda, sorta.

There are several problems --
  1. First, blogs are websites of a particular kind (usually the effort of a single person, easily but often irregularly updated, mostly non-commercial);

  2. The Web is an ever-changing universe, just like the real one, with new sites and blogs constantly being born even as others die;

  3. This means that stats are literally like frames in a video, changing every moment;

  4. Since the Web is by its very nature decentralized, there is no one central authority for what's going on.
Given these issues, it is still possible to get a meaningful glimpse of how Plainfield's blogs are faring in the overall mix.

First, how big is the Web?

For an answer, I turned to Netcraft (see here), which basically tracks the Web for the types of servers being used, but which has a useful chart --




Netcraft finds an increase of 7 million active sites over the past year, and the chart indicates a total of approximately 72.6 million (72,600,000) active websites (the total of registered websites is on the order of 240 million). That's quite a few needles in the haystack.

All well and good, but can we find out where Plainfield's blogs stand in the mix?

The service which I use is Alexa, a free ranking rating tool that bloggers can install to monitor their traffic and that of other sites or blogs in which they are interested (see here; for a peek at rankings without the bother of installing the tool, see Evrsoft's search page here).

Be aware that Alexa and other site trackers (like comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen Interactive and Quantcast) are businesses vying with each other and each snipes at the other about its accuracy. Among the factors that enter into a site's ranking are the frequency of posting, numbers of unique visitors, numbers of pages viewed, and links to and from other websites. For our purposes, Alexa is considered 'one of the most accurate FREELY AVAILABLE tools' for ranking sites', as Evrsoft says.

Hedged about with all these caveats, what I found on the eve of the New Year is that Plainfield blogs line up in a range (LOWER numbers indicate HIGHER TRAFFIC)
from 621,001 to 9.6 million, with the middle of the pack in the 800,000+ range. Plainfield's blog contingent is DEFINITELY NOT shabby. (For a little context, consider these traffic rankings: Courier News [38,749], Star-Ledger [2,431] and New York Times [97].)

Here's a chart --


BLOG

OWNER

TRAFFIC
RANKING
**
CLIPS
Dan Damon
621,001
Plainfield Today
Dan Damon
627,990
Plainfield Plaintalker
Bernice Paglia
789,367
Plainfield Sports News
Augustine Dashiell
807,079
Jerry Green's Page
Asm Jerry Green
811,741
Doc's Potpourri
Harold S. Yood, MD
813,064
Maria's Blog
Maria Pellum
825,574
Piv For Plainfield
Jim Pivnichny
842,687
Mapping It Out
Adrian Mapp
864,233
For Good Government
Cory Storch
869,880
Positive Change
Annie McWilliams
873,531
As I See It
Rashid Burney
873,532
The (TV) Show Must Go On
Jackie Schnoop
1,669,153
PEPTalk: Revisited
Renata Hernandez
5,006,907
Confessions of a Bathrobe Blogger
Rebecca Williams
8,037,864
Dottie G Sez
Dottie Gutenkauf
9,681,343

**As measured on ALEXA, 12/31/2009.


Keep in mind that on any given day, a blog's traffic may spike considerably: Plainfield Today's traffic shot up nearly tenfold when I posted about PolitickerNJ's overnight decision to go from FREE to $1,800/year for access (see here; the story was of intense interest to the NJ blogosphere). I also noted on Jackie's TV blog that her December 20 post Survivor: Samoa's season finale (see here) garnered an amazing 228 comments, leaving the rest of us to eat our hearts out.

While we're talking Plainfield blogs, please note that I am adding Dottie Gutenkauf's blog, Dottie G Sez, to the daily list (thanks to Dr. Yood for bringing it to folks' attention; please drop by and check it out), which also includes Rebecca Williams' Confessions of a Bathrobe Blogger, Jackie Schnoop's The (TV) Show Must Go On, and Renata Hernandez' PEPTalk: Revisited (where today she announces her candidacy for the Board of Ed).

Anyone with thoughts to share should consider this invigorating pasttime.

Come on in, the water's fine!



-- Dan Damon [follow]

View today's CLIPS here. Not getting your own CLIPS email daily? Click here to subscribe.

8 comments:

Augustine said...

Thanks Dan,

Fascinating research, image if we had budgets and staffs...lol (and me...time).

At least we have an idea that our (Plainfield) news can't be swept away, and by the numbers we all connect with our desired audiences.

Anonymous said...

Look at your readership...BRAVO!

Randy Schaeffer said...

Dan --

Thanks for compiling this information and introducing me to a number of sites I hadnt yet discovered.

Best,

Randy

Anonymous said...

Question. Noticed Plainfield Trees missing from list. Last post was May 2009. Do you know what happened to it?

RASRAHMATAZ said...

I'm realing have trouble buying these stats. The 11,000+ Hits I have just on my site for 2009 speak quite differently then this ranking thingy. Does it for example consider a specific "range" in time and not just an end date?

I'm just not clear what the ranking really tells people in terms of true readership.

I'm quite pleased with my 11K+ hits in 2009 considering my baby isn't even 2 years old and last year I only had about 1500 total hits from its start in July until December of 2008.

Numbers don't lie -- says who/whom???!!!

Dan said...

Rasrahmataz -- It's not hits, or visitors, or any other single measure. It's one day (Dec. 31), where Plainfield's blogs bobbed in the sea of websites that exist in the universe of websites.

There is no extrapolation to how any of us do as far a visitors, numbers of visits, pages viewed or time on site -- EXCEPT THAT we do better than MILLIONS of other sites, and less well than HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of others.

As I said, Plainfield's blogs don't show too shabby!

No more, no less.

RASRAHMATAZ said...

Gotcha.

Thanks for the clarification!

Still like my HIT Counter better -- LOL!

Unknown said...

Hi Dan,

You Plainfield bloggers seem to be pretty SEO savvy. Those numbers aren't shabby at all! Check out this post about ranking on Google, sure you'll find it helpful.
http://blog.directorymaximizer.com/2010/01/12/why-does-google-hate-my-site/