Archive for the ‘Blog Statistics’ Category
by David Peralty on May 24th, 2007
So the news broke, and some of my colleagues in Bloggy Network have already expressed their opinions when it comes to Google buying FeedBurner for $100 million dollars and so I wanted to recap some of what they have said, and add in my own thoughts on the acquisition.
Ahmed believes that this will provide Google with even more information about the elusive blogosphere and has published a post entitled Google & FeedBurner: Double Whammy.
So the acquisition of FeedBurner gives them a ton more information. They know clickrate. They know the subscription # of a lot of sites. They can find information/data they previously did not know existed (which I touched on briefly).
I talk about covering the A to Z process for our properties – Google has done the same. They know what end-users are doing (via Google Analytics). They know what end-users are reading and finding interesting (via Google Reader). And now they know how popular blogs are, and what people find interesting on those specific blogs (via Google FeedBurner). And don’t forget they can trick your ad habits now – not just via AdSense/Adwords, but also through DoubleClick now.
Griffith, over on Forever Geek, has published a post called Google acquires FeedBurner for $100 million.
He goes over more of the meat and potatoes of the deal, and give a quick nod to the possible inclusion of Adsense in RSS feeds.
Although FeedBurner already gave you the option of adding advertisement to your feeds, my guess is that now it will be Adsense exclusive, if it isn’t already (I haven’t checked in a long time). Other than that, you can probably rest assured that it will remain free for everyone. The only difference is that it will probably be integrated into more Google products.
I agree with both of them. This gives Google even more information on a wide variety of sites, and while Google is not really known for improving the features of a service they buy, they have started to make some serious headway with their Blogger platform, and I can see FeedBurner becoming an integral part of their Blogger blogs. As well as providing them with a large user base that they can get using Adsense both on their sites, and in their feeds. With FeedBurner, Adsense, and Analytics, they will be able to provide you with advertising and statistics to cover every angle.
I think this was a great move for both Google and for FeedBurner, and I look forward to seeing what interesting ways that FeedBurner is integrated into Google’s already powerful brand.
Categories: Advertising, Blog Statistics, Feed Tools
by David Peralty on May 24th, 2007
So the news broke, and some of my colleagues in Bloggy Network have already expressed their opinions when it comes to Google buying FeedBurner for $100 million dollars and so I wanted to recap some of what they have said, and add in my own thoughts on the acquisition.
Ahmed believes that this will provide Google with even more information about the elusive blogosphere and has published a post entitled Google & FeedBurner: Double Whammy.
So the acquisition of FeedBurner gives them a ton more information. They know clickrate. They know the subscription # of a lot of sites. They can find information/data they previously did not know existed (which I touched on briefly).
I talk about covering the A to Z process for our properties – Google has done the same. They know what end-users are doing (via Google Analytics). They know what end-users are reading and finding interesting (via Google Reader). And now they know how popular blogs are, and what people find interesting on those specific blogs (via Google FeedBurner). And don’t forget they can trick your ad habits now – not just via AdSense/Adwords, but also through DoubleClick now.
Griffith, over on Forever Geek, has published a post called Google acquires FeedBurner for $100 million.
He goes over more of the meat and potatoes of the deal, and give a quick nod to the possible inclusion of Adsense in RSS feeds.
Although FeedBurner already gave you the option of adding advertisement to your feeds, my guess is that now it will be Adsense exclusive, if it isn’t already (I haven’t checked in a long time). Other than that, you can probably rest assured that it will remain free for everyone. The only difference is that it will probably be integrated into more Google products.
I agree with both of them. This gives Google even more information on a wide variety of sites, and while Google is not really known for improving the features of a service they buy, they have started to make some serious headway with their Blogger platform, and I can see FeedBurner becoming an integral part of their Blogger blogs. As well as providing them with a large user base that they can get using Adsense both on their sites, and in their feeds. With FeedBurner, Adsense, and Analytics, they will be able to provide you with advertising and statistics to cover every angle.
I think this was a great move for both Google and for FeedBurner, and I look forward to seeing what interesting ways that FeedBurner is integrated into Google’s already powerful brand.
Categories: Advertising, Blog Statistics, Feed Tools
by David Peralty on May 6th, 2007
Big news today for those of you that have been jealous of WordPress.com’s statistics, they are finally a plugin for those of you hosting your WordPress blog elsewhere. Much like Akismet, the new WordPress statistics plugin called Automattic Stats has been released. It is a service based plugin, that requires a WordPress API key.
I am super excited to try this out. I haven’t just yet, as I am on my laptop in a hotel, but as soon as I am back on a real computer, I will be all over it.
Here are some details:
Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.
Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.
Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.
This was recently announced on WordPress.com, but I think it deserves a post on WordPress.org’s blog.
Categories: Blog Statistics, WordPress News
by David Peralty on April 27th, 2007
Over on BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting has posted some interesting details, it seems like the growth of new active blogs has slowed over the last few months, and they are going as far as to say that we are peaking, at least in the English speaking world.
Here’s his answer: “The number of new posts per day that Technorati is tracking is indeed increasing, from about 1.3 million posts per day to about 1.5 million postings per day.”
However, there has been slight decrease in the number of English-language posts.
The number of daily English language posts dropped to 495,000 in March from 507,000 in October.
In other words, in October 2006, 39% of blog posts were in English. In March 2007, only 33% were in in English.
In his email Sifry says “My conclusion is that we’re still seeing growth in the blogosphere, but that the growth is slowing.”
Check out the full post, and let me know what you think this means for the blogosphere in general.
Categories: Blog Statistics
by David Peralty on March 28th, 2007
The title of this post is the same question that is being asked at WPDesigner.com today in hopes of judging a fair price for what I assume is a custom WordPress theme. I have priced getting one created before, and the price for me has ranged from about two hundred dollars, all the way up to around three and four thousand dollars. While a non-unique theme, slightly modified was more in the ten to hundred dollar range.
The poll on WPDesigner only allows you to chose one of four choices being either, five dollars, ten dollars, twenty dollars or forty-five dollars. Currently, there are less than twenty-five voters, but so far the consensus seems to be that twenty dollars is pricing it right.
Have your say at WPDesigner.com.
Categories: Blog Statistics, WordPress Themes
by David Peralty on March 27th, 2007
Over on franticindustries they have a list of the top forty blogs according to their FeedBurner subscribers. While it isn’t precise, and he even mentions going about it in an unscientific way, he still releases his results and they are fun to read.
Here is a snippet from his article:
However, FeedBurner, for some reason, isn’t trying to be a popularity measuring tool. They have the data. They have the capabilities. Yet, they’re not maintaining any sort of top list of feeds with the most subscribers. The number of RSS subscribers is not the ultimate way to measure the popularity of a website, but it’s a really important metric. If FeedBurner were to maintain such a top list, it would be at least as important as Technorati and Alexa’s top lists.
Besides waiting for FeedBurner to actually do a top list, the second best thing I could do is to create my own list of top blogs according to their FeedBurner RSS subscriber data. Maybe this experiment encourages the folks at FeedBurner to do the same thing themselves.
And now for the top five from his top forty list:
- BoingBoing – 397k Readers
- TechCrunch – 341k Readers
- Simply Recipes – 212k Readers
- Interesting Thing of the Day – 99935 Readers
- 43Folders – 102k Readers
Readers fluctuate, which I assume is why 43Folders has more readers as of my checking it today.
via 901am
Categories: Blog Statistics
by David Peralty on March 8th, 2007
Peter van Gerner recently e-mailed me to let me know about a survey he is running which is focused upon bloggers and social bookmarking. The results will be published on his blog, and it only takes a few minutes to complete. The survey closes on the 14th of March, so please take a look. If you notice that the English is a little off, that is only because this is a survey created by someone in the Netherlands.
If you are interested in participating, please check out www.petervangerner.nl
Categories: Blog Statistics
by David Peralty on February 27th, 2007
Abe Olandres has written an article on the Blog Herald about how bloggers are paid and how they should be paid. He mentions a few things blog networks could do to make their writers happier including things like:
- Traffic Bonus
- Seniority Bonus
- Performance Bonus
- Travel & Training
- Schwag Bags
I love his write-ups for each section and totally agree with his positive spin on this otherwise touchy subject.
Basically, to throw my thoughts in the ring when it comes to blogging payouts. I think that if you aren’t making at least minimum wage after blogging for a network for at least six months, then you might want to concentrate on something else that can make you that kind of money.
Categories: Blog Statistics
by David Peralty on January 29th, 2007
If you love tracking your blog’s statistics, there is one piece of software that has had a lot of press, especially today, as Shaun Inman’s Mint gets an upgrade. Shaun talks about the changes on his newly redesigned site, as well as the upgraded design of HaveaMint.com. He also launches a site to track the extensions on mint called Peppermill.
What’s new in Mint 2.0?
- staggered loading of Pepper panes improving Mint page load time
- tons of interface and hierarchy refinements (including support for custom styles)
- improved pane tiling that reclaims wasted screen real estate
- css-based Visits graphs
- a bunch of tabs can now be filtered by timespan
- a new Domains tab added to the Referrers pane groups referrers by domain and sorts by the number of referrers from each domain
- Watched tab of the Pages pane has been expanded to display referrers of Watched pages
- Searches differentiates between image and web searches
Jonathan Snook makes a good point in his post, entitled “Pay to Upgrade?”, where he expresses his shock that everyone assumed this upgrade would be free. It does in fact cost $19 USD per license to upgrade, unless you purchased after January 1st, 2007. To get a whole new license, you are still looking at $30 USD a domain. So if you have ten sites, getting them to the new Mint 2.0, you are looking at between $190 to $300, unless you can get a special volume license from Shaun. Not cheap, but depending on how many Peppers, extensions, work with this new version, it might be worth it, especially for the RSS feed statistics.
RSS Feed Statistics?
One of the new additions to the included Pepper list is Bird Feeder, a tool that watches your various feeds.
From Shaun’s blog:
Your RSS and Atom feeds attract all kinds of colorful wildlife, Bird Feeder is a window onto that activity. It highlights subscription trends across multiple Feeds and clicks on individual Seeds. What’s a seed? That’s bird-ese for an article or link within a feed. Poo-tee-weet?
Bird Feeder is savvy (and a fan of Kurt Vonnegut apparently). Online aggregators usually provide the number of subscribers for whom they fetch your feeds. Bird Feeder takes note of this so numbers should be comparable to hosted services like Feedburner. It even integrates with an updated User Agent 007, adding an additional Readers tab so you can see which tools are being used to subscribe to your feeds.
A very interesting addition, and it says a lot about the types of features that can be added to the software. Not to mention, the new design looks pretty slick.
Check out Mint 2.0.
Categories: Blog Statistics
by David Peralty on January 5th, 2007
Darren Rowse pointed out some startling news, it seems the deal between Performancing and Pay Per Post wasn’t set in stone, and has now fallen through.
When I saw it, my jaw dropped as many of the people I know were not happy with Pay Per Post taking over Performancing’s Metrics blog stats package, and now that is no longer the case. Though this really means the end of the Metrics service as they state in their posting on Performancing.com:
After much discussion, we’ve decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isnt right for us or our community. It’s regrettable that we should part ways as I still feel that Dan and Ted are stand up guys breaking new ground, but in the end, the deal was just not right for them or us.
Open Source
Our free blog statistics package, Metrics will be given back to the community with our thanks — we can no longer run it, which means the service will end, but we hope that the developer community will make good use of the code and that we can continue to help the project by hosting it and providing support where we can.
Categories: Blog Statistics, Blogging News
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