Sunday, February 1, 2009

Keeping Score

Your anonymous, absentee administrator is pleased to see site traffic here breach the daily thousand level. I thought it must be due to the recent Krugman link, but in fact there have been spikes in the past as well. If you check the Sitemeter link (bottom, right column), you can see a new plateau of 16,000 visitors a month was hit on September of 2008. This past month it was 26,000. In general the blog is doing pretty well for a group of deep thinkers. Of course, there is really nothing like it on the left. Among economics blogs of all political stripes, this was ranked 19th, ahead of 'Freakonomics' and other illustrious characters.

We should give a special shout-out to Diane Warth of Karmalised for help on the site management front.

Congratulations to all, and remember folks, the more you post the more readers you will get.

5 comments:

Barkley Rosser said...

I am not sure that Palgrave Econolog does their rankings by how much a blog is linked to or read. There are all sorts of ways to do these rankings. When he was operating (not anymore) Aaron Schiff was doing it by technorati links. The still functioning brian gongol does it by daily views, although I do not know if this is a one day observation or some average over time. He redoes it once a month, and we just moved from 57th to 52nd. He claims 850 views per day, merely an increase of 1/2% over the past month. That makes me suspect he is doing a one day estimate.

Leigh Caldwell said...

Palgrave is primarily driven by incoming links from other blogs in the Econolog database (links from other sites are ignored). They have some formula for tiebreaking but that won't be much of an issue if you are up at 19th. Down in the 50s where I am, we need to fight hard with all the other sites that have 4 incoming links.

I must get round to submitting to Brian Gongol too. Why are we so obsessed with rankings in this field?

Barkley Rosser said...

BTW, I happen to agree with the anomymous administrator that Diane Warth is doing an excellent job and wish to join in commending her for that.

Also, I had not previously checked out sitemeter, but if the numbers of others on gongol remain the same, and he uses the 1555 I just saw for the week's average (if I got that right), then we would be at 34th on gongol rather than 52nd. He also compares these to how many people read the top 200 newspapers. At 850, we were below that threshold. At 1555, we are between the Quad Cities something out of Davenport, IA and the Stockton CA something.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Brian Gongol has his new monthly ranking out, and we are listed at 39th with a supposed daily read of 1510, putting us now in with those comparable to the readership of one of the top 200 newspapers in the country, with us now comparable to the Bloomington-Normal Pantagraph, whoop de doo!

Anonymous said...

I simply use whatever data is displayed by the standard page given for Sitemeter. Not being a Sitemeter user myself, I don't know whether it's rolling 30-day average or what. For those other services that make specific time periods available, I use "Last Month" or "Last 30 Days", as available. For the handful of sites where actual server logs are available, I use the last month -- that's why I typically can't finish the rankings until at least the 2nd of each month; some of the server logs don't roll over until very late on the 1st.

Hope that's illustrative enough for you. Feel free to contact me any time with other questions.