Audience for weblogs?

Robert is waging a personal war against "traditional" industry pundits (particularly John Dvorak), postulating that they're afraid of the readership that blogs as garnering. So, just how popular are these blogs?

Scott Watermasysk (who runs the dotnetweblogs host that many of us use) has given me access to the statistics. As of today, for this week starting Sunday, I've had 8,709 page views of blog (mostly the RSS feed by a factor of about 10:1). And I've only been blogging for about 2 weeks! The other thing that stands out is that Scott Guthrie has the most page views - almost 47K, about the same as frequent blogger Sam Gentile - even though Scott hasn't posted anything since April 1st. Lots of people apparently waiting for Scott to post something to their RSS aggregator.

So, how many hits does Robert get? The userland statistics page shows he's had 341 page views so far today and a total of 193K page views in the approximately 1.5 years they've been aggregating statistics. Dunno if that includes RSS hits. Also, I just had coffee with Matt Carter (most recently VP of Fawcette's online operations, now - after taking the red pill - in charge of developer titles for MS Press) who said that while Robert's traffic can't be compared to a web site, the number of people who read his blog several years ago (when it was hosted by Fawcette spin-off DevX) was surprisingly high. More importantly, the names of the people who read his blog read like the "Who's who" of the industry. In fact, I've heard that Steve Ballmer has made public reference to his blog.

3 Comments

  • No, Radio doesn't count RSS hits, and it's not 100% accurate either. It serves an invisible 1x1 image onto the page, which is logged and counted at the home server. And those servers are VERY slow and will as often as not simply timeout.





    The only true measure is to count on the server itself, and to differentiate 304s from serving actual content (although ScottW hasn't yet implemented his support for 304, so I hope when he does, he updates the stats he's giving you to only reflect when actual content or RSS is download, and not cache hits).

  • Hi all! Is it possible to take a look at the stats (just curiosity)? Or do I have to wait until Scott has had the time to improve this already-great dotnetweblogs.com site, by showing stats?





    Greetz


    Jan

  • i have direct access to my log files as my server is sitting on a cable line at home. i have just done a quick check though my log files. since april 20, i have had 2141 hits in the /blog directory that my blog is hosted in. that includes RSS things too. i also use a web based counter, which reported about 150+ users (unique) a day for the last while. so by my calcs, im getting half visiting the site, and half visiting the RSS links.

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