20 August 2008

Ian Wishart - really that popular?

Now Ian Wishart's blog "Briefing Room" claims that his online publication "TGIF edition" is a huge hit, with 20,000 downloads and counting. Who knows, maybe it is true and it hasn't got through to Alexa, because Alexa doesn't rank his site highly at all.

You see Briefing Room gets a ranking of 3,542 in New Zealand.
Investigate Magazine gets a ranking of 8,594
By contrast I get a ranking of 2,002.
Tumeke ranked his blog at 29th in June, and it will be interesting to see where it was in July.

I know I get on average 241 hits a day at present. Weekends dip below 200 and weekdays can regularly get over 300. To get 20,000 downloads would take around 10-11 weeks.

However this all pales into comparison with the likes of Kiwiblog, Public Address, Whale Oil and Not PC. Naturally I don't want to deny Wishart any genuine success he has, I may not like some of what he writes, but that isn't the point. The point is that either Alexa is badly wrong, Wishart is claiming success over a longer period than some may think or it's hyperbole.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Scott...this is why Alexa is somewhat unreliable.

Our Urchin 5 reports from our ISP host are showing 142,000 pageviews from Aug 1st up to August 20, indicating we'll probably reach somewhere around 200,000 to 210,000 pageviews for the month, off around somewhere between 30,000 to 50,000 sessions.

The Investigate website regularly ranges between 112,000 pageviews to 180,000 in a normal month.

I'm presuming you meant pageviews and not hits, but for the sake of completeness our "hits" for the month of August so far are 458,000.

Alexa relies on an active choice by a user to host their software and cookies, which fewer people are prepared to do. The sample sizes of NZ Alexa users are probably sufficiently small to be unreliable.

Hope this clarifies.

It is worth bearing in mind that the main Investigate site incorporates archived magazine stories, live news and blog feeds, and the online store.

TBR.cc is separate.

Anonymous said...

LS - I read your blog on a regular basis. Although I might not always agree with what you say, I find that you have well thought out reasoning and you certainly challenge some of my (preconceived) ideas.

With an average of 240 hits, you are an under appreciated resource in the blogosphere.