One hundred thousand

That's the total number of page views of this blog, according to Sitemeter, although TypePad says it's only 83,000 or so. Still, it seems like a time to take stock or at least review some basic stats:

First post: November 2005. Total number of posts, excluding this one, 292. So that's about two a week.

Number of visits: about 60,000. So on average a visit is two pages. Most are only one, and a few people with nothing better to do click around once in a while.

Average page view rate is about 100 per day. Probably a good half of those are inappropriate searches, and it looks which leaves an actual readership of about 50 people per day. In general my traffic is lower than that, but I seem to have a handful of patrons (thank you Nick C, Henry F, Mark T, Brad D) who have sent people this way and then I get a spike.

Most views in a day was over 2500 when Nick Carr pointed people to Mr. Google's Guidebook. I've only had one post get traffic through reddit or digg, which was a computer software post some time ago.

Audience: On average, I'm writing for an audience of about 100 people, although there is no way to tell someone who reads every word I write from someone who glances at the title and moves on.

Comments: 429, or about 1.5 comments per post. My impression is this is pretty low even for blogs of my readership. Not surprising as I am too slow a writer to get into many of the debates that prompt comments and don't link to other bloggers as much as I should. Partly, while some widely read blogs post link collections to draw people's attention to particular views, it seems a waste to post such collections here. There is little point in me saying "hey, look what the BBC/New York Times/CBC has posted"; if you need a guide to the news you won't find it here.

Thanks to those of you who come here regularly. I will try to respond to comments more often, but let's face it, that resolution may well go the way of my others.

Now, if I just carry on blogging for another two years I should have the same size audience as my 30 second caterpillar video has achieved on YouTube, recorded in less than twenty minutes in a single afternoon.

Comments

[Ryan Shaw]

Are you counting RSS feed subscriptions? I always read you through RSS and rarely ever visit your web site.

[tomslee]

Good point. Sitemeter only counts page hits. I started running feedburner recently and it reports about 347 subscribers with a reach of around 25. Not sure what those numbers mean though.

[Jason]

I also read your stuff through the RSS feed.

[Michael]

I read most everything you write through rss, and even if I saw your comment box, I wouldn't know how to respond to most of it. Your writing creates a non-analytic response in me, and I don't usually express feelings through words.

It makes me happy when I see you have a new post.

[Kevin Ballard]

I wonder how many people are like me and give you zero pageviews because we read your articles in our RSS readers?

[tomslee]

Thanks everyone. I have a feeling that Feedburner is supposed to be telling me about you RSS types but I am not sure how to read its tea-leaves.

[Elliot Ross]

I also use RSS - and yes - I was one of the crowd (flock? herd?) coming from Nick C's reference!

Immediately subsribed

Regards

Elliot Ross

[Ben]

I loved your dissection of the long tail. Bought your book on game theory too. Very good.

[Russ]

You are a strange loop- and that's a great thing :-) Insightful analysis, and particularly appreciate the story approach a la Mr Googles Guidebook, you have great style.
Cheers,
Russ.
P.S. Quality not quantity is always the metric to focus on :-)

[tomslee]

Thanks again everyone. Without wanting to be an attention troll, it is good to know there are people on the other end of this.