I used StatBrain to measure 23 Big Island blogs. It is a site that measures traffic to hundreds of Web sites. It is not an exact science, but it gives a good picture of how many visits a Web site has. In my own experience, I’ve used StatBrain with personal and commercial Web sites and found it to be a reliable tool. You can read about how they compile their figures here.
The 10 most popular sites (and their estimated traffic per day) are:
Wordful.com 5,476
PunaWeb.org 3,388
BigIslandVideoNews 1,171
Hawaii247.org 791
FBI Blogs.com 636
DamonTucker.com 588
Hahaha.hamakuasprings.com 497
BigIslandChronicle 417
Mediabaron.com 355
DarkerView.com 238
*Note: Hawaii24.7.org provides actual user data via Quantcast. Their average U.S. daily traffic numbers are used here instead.
I was surprised that blogs run by professional journalists didn’t pull in more traffic. But of course traffic has no correlation to quality. I found the best-researched, most well-written articles are on blogs with less than 10 users or less per day.
I was also surprised because I didn’t expect the top site to be pulling in as much traffic as the next three combined. But I can explain why. Wordful.com focuses on an immensely popular topic — Web content and creativity. All the other sites, with the exception of Darkerview, focus only on Big Island News, which, by definition, attracts a small crowd. PunaWeb is an easy-to-use bulletin-board style forum that encourages frequent, honest discussion about almost any topic of local interest, but there is a lot of noise. Even on Damon Tucker’s FBI Blogs site, it’s difficult to sort through which sites are the “best” or “most useful.” After doing this project, I was wishing for an “editor” who would just put it all together for me!
There are a few, very high-quality sites that receive less than 10 visits per day, according StatBrain. However, I think that trend will be short-lived because each one offers thoughtful, analytical and comprehensive information about the most important events, news and issues affecting the Big Island.
Alanmcnarie.blogspot.com
Apacificview.blogspot.com
Breeweehawaii.blogspot.com
Coconutgirlwireless.wordpress.com
Islandnotes.wordpress.com
Japaninsight.wordpress.com
Myhawaiianhome.blogspot.com
Thekonablog.wordpress.com
The value of these blogs is a hyperlocal view about topics of interest that could not otherwise receive any attention in the mass media. (Especially in West Hawaii Today!)
For advertisers, being able to connect with 300 individuals who have an interest in their product or service is far more compelling than reaching 3,000 people who don’t. So whether it be politics, skydiving, astronomy, agriculture, aquaculture, the Internet brings like-minded individuals together, encourages them to share information and create something new.
That means that whether you are a blog reader or blog advertiser, the most important metric of a site’s value is not the site’s traffic, but the value of its content. And so far, there isn’t a Web tool to measure that! Though I am still looking for a reliable Web editor ….
17 comments ↓
Aloha Laura,
I don’t believe these statistics are correct.
The wordpress stats feature says I average a bit more.
Jun 1
1,029
Jun 2
756
Jun 3
951
Jun 4
910
Jun 5
662
Jun 6
653
Jun 7
622
WEEK Total 5,583 Daily Average 798
Jun 8
856
Jun 9
812
Jun 10
927
Jun 11
767
Jun 12
696
Jun 13
646
TOTAL 4,997 AVERAGE: 784
My numbers have dropped dramatically since opening the FBI Blogs as I haven’t been posting that much and the last couple months I’ve been busy with the Census Bureau.
Also, the FBI Blogs is not averaging what these statistics are saying either.
P.S. you ready to come join the FBI YET?
Guaranteed Bree Wee’s Site pulls in more visits then most of us bloggers combined.
The StatBrain data isn’t very accurate. They list the Honolulu Advertiser website only getting something like 35K/day which seems to be very low.
As for Hawaii247.org website, I turned-off the .com website months ago but StatBrain lists it as getting 216 visitors. Not bad for a dead website. Our website is the .org and even those numbers are way off.
We have analytics turned on our site for both Google Analytics and Woopra and both of those jive with each other. So yeah, something like StatBrain isn’t very good.
Oh and I forgot to add. Hawaii247.org is NOT a blog. There are many talented people who provide content for Hawaii247.org and to label it like it was personal blog by me wouldn’t be accurate or fair to them.
Some people even think the Hawaii247 Twitter account is my personal account, it isn’t, I’m not the only one to post stuff on there. I have my own personal blog and twitter account. After all, I don’t think Hawaii247 really needs to be following the exploits of Tiki Bar TV’s Dr. Tiki and Johnny Johnny and Lala, I do :)
Huh? You find StatBrain to be a “reliable tool?” Reliable in what way?
At the StatBrain site they admit that it is all estimation, and they go into very little detail as to how an estimate is generated. Look at their own feedback; 100% say the estimated traffic is too low, 100% say it is about right, and 100% say it is too high. Um, that is 300%! You “rely” on a service that can’t even publish a chart with columns that add up to 100%? haha
Your choice, but it looks like snake oil to me. The only traffic figure SB cares about is its own.
http://www.statbrain.com/works.php5
Aloha Laura,
Thanks for the encouragement that your assessment of Island Notes brings me. It’s curious to note the absence of http://www.margaretwille.com on your list. She writes well. I look forward to reading more of your blog. Mahalo.
Well, 200+ is probably about right for DarkerView. I get about 150 a day direct (Google Analytics) and maybe another 50-75 RSS subscriptions. But I agree some of the other numbers do not seem right.
Thanks for the feedback, Andrew. I like how you broke your numbers down.
Aloha Darren,
I started with some of the most popular feeds (those that are linked to by more than 3 other blogs) and also tried to measure most of the FBIblog sites. What I found was that a) 70% were reporting >10 visits per day b) After 2 hours and 23 sites later, I was getting bored with the experiment. But thanks for the link! I will definitely check it out.
I’ve compared Statbrain data to Web server logs in commercial and private environments and found it to be accurate within 10-20%, which is extremely acceptable. For example, I have inside knowledge of traffic for a few select Big Island Web sites. StatBrain uses VISITOR data — based on IP — and also looks at the number of links that point towards the site AS WELL AS ITS ALEXA ranking. I believe that very small sites as the ones we are talking about are going to generate larger margins of error than larger sites that have more data. Less data = less reliability. I find it curious that no one has suggested a more reliable measure. Surely you don’t propose to actually take site vendor’s claims of what their traffic is? For anyone considering Web advertising or partnering or joint ventures, I think any independent measure is worthwhile, and this is just one tool I found that has worked for me. If you don’t like it, then please — find another and share it.
Personally, I think 35,000 for Honolulu Advertiser site sounds just about right.
So this tells me Statbrain may be off by 25% — but how many of your sessions include visits by non-humans? Google indexing, for example? Put another way, how many sessions lasted longer than 30 seconds? As I stated in a previous reply, I believe that 20% of all server data is generated by bots, so that would make Statbrain’s numbers accurate to within 10% in this particular case. Larger sites = better/more accurate data. Smaller sites will have larger errors of margin. Want me to do an Alexa ranking next? :)
Most of the blogs I visit on a daily basis I rarely stay more then 10-15 seconds on.
If the blogger hasn’t updated their page since the last time I visited… I will only stay 5 seconds or less.
Does that make people who go to peoples site looking for an updated page then considered a “Bot” or a “Nobody”.
Blogs are popular because they can be updated at any time of the day. Typically newspapers are loaded once and then read once in a day. I blog many times during the day so my readers come back multiple times during the day.
If I haven’t updated my blog w/in the last 5 hours… they keep coming back even more often to see if it’s been updated.
Does that make those “hits” not worthy?
Good point. So then just tell me how many visitors were there for more than 1 second? And you’ll agree most blogs take at least that long to load? So site visits that are less time than it takes the page to even load are good indicators of bots.
Here are my Daily Averages for the last few weeks:
5/10 6,117 Visits during the week Average per day 874
5/17 5,562 795
5/24 5,650 807
5/31 6,636 948
6/7 5,583 798
6/14 5,413 773
475 Visits today and still have 11 more hours left in the day
Mind you that my visits have gone down dramatically since I started the FBI Blogs… which tells me some of my normal readers simply switched over to that site.
Also my numbers have been down during the last couple months because I simply haven’t had that much time to blog.
“About the math
If you try to verify our computations using the numbers in these tables you might get different results. The logic is explained here.
* An average is the sum of views divided by the number of days.
* We exclude days prior to the first recorded view and future days.
* Today (Jun 15) is excluded from averages because it isn’t over yet.
* Yearly averages are computed from sums, not an average of monthly averages.
* Averages are rounded to the nearest integer for display.
* Gray zeroes are exactly zero. Black zeroes have been rounded down.
* Percent change is computed from weekly averages before they are rounded.
Just a note: we don’t count your own visits to your blog.”
Again, the accuracy of StatBrain.com is way off. If you type-in gibberish between www. and .com and enter that into StatBrain it registers 12 visitors/day. So they’re saying a site that doesn’t exist, can’t possibly have an Alexa ranking, gets more hits than eight blogs mentioned in your post.
I just typed-in http://www.amazon.com to look at stats and the result was 125,439. Better sell the stock, sounds like they’re tanking according to StatBrain.com
I’d say StatBrain.com is a poor measure of statistics as it’s just guessing, and often poorly at that.
As for my blog, the address for my personal blog is NOT http://www.mediabaron.com, the blog is in a sub-directory so the numbers above are incorrect if you’re talking about my blog. My blog gets way LESS pageviews than the numbers above. ha.
If anything, this post was a great traffic generator for your new blog and probably benefited StatBrain as well with folks hitting their page and all their affiliate ads for hits.
Keep up the writing, more posts = more traffic. :)
Take a peek at the guy behind Statbrain:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22Zach+Highknee%22&aq=f&oq=Zach+Highknee+fraud&aqi=&aq=f&oq=%22Zach+Highknee%22&aqi=&fp=JJ2lHziMUzc
Love you Laura… don’t you just love jumping into the blogging world?
Now you see what I get on a daily basis!!!
You are going to make one of the islands best bloggers… I can feel it in you!
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