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If it's something entirely new like a product release, it might drive a lot of traffic. If it is some small piece of niche news (like V-wag tends to publish), you will only get those few people who actually care clicking through.
Publishing cycles have expanded to include dozens of posts a day on some of these blogs. Only a few posts a day will catch fire. It's the way it has to work, I fear. Thus the belief that these sites are driving less traffic per link.
Once you get past that top tier, then the traffic that any individual site can drive is nominal unless they happen to write for a very close-knit niche. Example, a post of mine appeared on the front page of a blog in New Zealand for 2 days. The traffic for the site is about 1/20th of Digg but I probably got 10k visitors in that period.
I like this statement, it demonstrates that everyone isn't all about numbers, but about building a good, solid community.
Just sayin.
As for traffic, in my niche, stumbleupon rules. I haven't found anywhere else that supplies such a steady stream of knowledgable traffic. Stumbleupon may not give you the big Digg numbers but when you are surviving (and thriving) in the long tail you wont get on the front page of Digg anyway!
When traffic low, claim "superior" audiences or "community", when traffic high, claim the trend has finally taken hold, you of course, being the first to know. It's a great shell con-game -- you never lose.
Low = Better people. "Smarter" more "engaged" audiences, more "purchasing power", greater mind-share, the "influentials", The Übermensch. The best wisdom of the masses.
High = They finally get it, but what stupid morons they be, for taking so long. We were here first, and we invented everything, you must pay your fair share and worship us.
Try to explain why Techmeme has NEVER linked to a non-English website. Good luck.
Techmeme is to me an absolute abomination. It's exactly the kind of sites that corporations want you to stick with, because it's such a 0.000000000000000001% of the internet, therefore a good way to keep you UNINFORMED about what's going on.
I have had Stumbled articles get 8000 to 10,000 page views in a couple of days. Most of the time SU results in about 300 page views in a few minutes, then, if people like it, it gets more, and then more.
If people hate it, it vanishes, never to be seen again.
I also used to get a lot of visits from the front page of wordpress.com back before Matt decided my blog is not very interesting and banned it from the top blogs ranking.
Re. TechMem - from what I've heard of the selection algorithms they sound exactly designed to keep echo chamber blogs at the top of the list.
Hmm, not sure if I am subscribed to your link blog - got a link?
Look, what makes you think you aren't writing a paris hilton blog, for the tech world, anyway? Equally fluffy and lacking substance, but lacking the audience, too.
It seems to me to be a mistake to equate tech fanboy fluff with substance.
It seems like a lot of my web time is spent reading off-site. Only when I read "smart content" am I compelled to respond. I wonder if that traffic is measured . . .
Sure, there's a quality over quantity issue. Most of us would rather have good, intelligent readers than a swarm of abusive visitors. But I think it's not wrong to have a correction before the scale gets too out of whack.
OK, so there are a maximum of 5,000 top level tech-heads who might drive past you after seeing a story on Techmeme. They're pretty high quality traffic (not exclusively, though). But there are still only 5,000 of them - I'm not sure it's enough of a critical mass to drive forward any kind of ecosystem apart from one based purely on something (a) ladder-climbing (Techmeme as popularity contest).
Don't get me wrong - I like Techmeme; I use it a lot. I just think we've got to keep our toes in touch with reality; the constant chatter about it seems out of line with the actuality of what it does.
Tech Blog Link Power: Spiky Visitors or Sticky Visitors?
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/10/tech-blog...
As for traffic, one has to decide why they blog in the first place. If it's for conversations, then it doesn't really matter all that much how many visitors they have. If it's to sell ads, that's another story. I hope most bloggers are out there to be educated, to share a story and to communicate.
They don't buy, they don't click ads, and they don't leave comments (preferring instead to comment on the site they came from, not mine)
The only benefit of this traffic is that it usually generates a few other links on other websites.. which helps with SEO
As far as good traffic, yahoo site of the day was by far the best. many hundreds of thousands of visitors who actually clicked ads and commented!
Kim Komando reference actually saw a good increase in converting traffic too.. so does local news shows whenever they mention me (plug: I'm on channel 4 in Detroit tonight at 11 talking about internet slang)
I've been on Scoble's link blog too. I got a couple hundred visitors.. but no comments / ad clicks, etc from it.
The power of Techmeme is the aggregation and discovery for the user.
What I've found is that when that happens, it makes little difference. In a couple of days, traffic returns to normal, and almost none of those people leave comments, click ads, or so much as bother to explore the site. They read the linked article and then go.
Search traffic seems to bring the most activity. People who find the site through Google tend to click around a bit before leaving. RSS subscribers seem to be the best metric for an engaged audience.
This whole tech blogging scene has traffic numbers that are a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than reasonably well visited political and pop culture sites.
No value judgment there. That's just how it is. (I'm here because I clicked through from Dave Winer, whose blog, Scripting News, I read quite regularly).
cheers!
I hereby declare Fark to be the new King of teh Intarwebs!
My conclusion is that get a link from a top blog in your niche and you will see traffic and more importantly those visitors will return. If you get on to Digg front page traffic only lasts for 2 days and then no one will return back.
Although i never got in to Techmeme i daily visit it to see what's hot in the tech world
Are you sure?
Unfortunately if you say so it contradicts the definition of Techmeme.
Do you want my definition, or Gabe's ?
Traffic from Digg is spiky and tends not to result in recurrent readership.
We get a relatively larger and higher quality traffic stream from the sites for Apple fans, such as appleinvestornews.com and Mac Surfer, which we are on frequently because of our extensive recent coverage (again, from a stock perspective) of the iPhone.
Also, we have a tag for housing for content covering the housing market, and there's a lot of traffic from housing related sites.
Hopefully this is a slightly different perpective than the pure tech focus you guys have.
link blog?
I'm not sure why anyone needs to get defensive about it.
You're right, I imagine that the Guardian doesn't drive vast amounts of traffic either - certainly not my little blog, which ponders along of its own accord. But since we're not an aggregator I don't think it's particularly important or relevant, and nobody's talking us up.
Like I said, I've got a lot of respect for what Gabe's doing - it just seemed to me like nobody was giving any sense of proportion to the leaderboard. Seems like a topic worth talking about, no?
Paul: I've been on Fake Steve a number of times. Usually get a couple of thousand visits from there. A lot more than Valleywag.
Robert, how many books does this blog sell?
The top vertical publications in print media, for example, has about 50-80k circulation and that's considered high for a vertical. I think the web is going to prove basically the same, but the industry overall is still a little closed minded and inexperienced to understand it yet. People haven't really even really discovered that Alexa has flaws as an analytics tool, or that traffic can be and is bought/engineered. I think it'll be a long while before anyone fully understands what traffic should look like in niches, like techmeme.
So, you hear a lot of that garbage but don't blame the messenger.
-Americo
I use lot of this, and for aggregators like techmeme I tend to just open new tabs for the links.
2nd StumbleUpon.
3rd TechMeme.
All these great community sites haven't come close to cracking the egg with the average consumer.
Digg? Just a bunch of Nazis over there, and lemmings.
Scoble just said it's not about "influencing" the masses, but influencing smart people who actually change the world, not lemmings who follow any charismatic warmonger or leader.
Daniel
Yes I beleive in the same becuase just getting the traffic in not important but they should take the benifts from the same
MoralsandEthics
http://moralsandethics.wordpress.com/
StumbleUpon - 10,000 - 25,000
Reddit - 5,000
del.icio.us/popular - 3,000
Spillover traffic from bloggers who've found my sites through these sources: Priceless
I agree - great way of saying it.
Robert - love the debate. Thanks for posting.
There are ways to get more traffic but quantity vs quality is the issue.
This business model of spinning the social networks is a temporary climax, with too much foreplay needed. Then the girl leaves as soon as you stop putting the money on the table.
I would rather be on a on-theme site and there continuously for years than one time in digg or stumbled or all theme genetically impaired, mass breeding rabbit sites.
Good business is a day to day traffic, not spikes, especially when the spike is totally manipulated.
Andy of HoboTraveler.com
As long as its always there and doesnt need to be fed all the time by your time..
Cheers!