Traffic

Is internet traffic an indication of a site’s quality, popularity or both? What do more hits really mean and where do all the hits come from? A look into the world of web hits and misses – and the infamous Alexa toolbar.

I have often had to explain to visitors of this blog that its aim is not to reach a massive readership but to provide quality discussion to those who chose to be both discerning and engaging. Translated to hit-attracting terminology it’s not about mass but about quality. The MSM has two reasons in the battle for the audience: (1) More audience equals more money or (2) in the case of political oriented MSM more audience also means more subjects for propaganda. For obvious reasons J’accuse does not fall in any of the two categories.

First of all this blog does not earn its author any more dough with more visitors. “More” is rather superfluous in that sentence since it implies that there is value that is lesser than more. In actual fact this blog is a loss making enterprise insofar as money is concerned. Secondly, and more importantly, while J’accuse does not profess to be opinion neutral, we only present a theory or idea of our own to the discerning reader in order to have it countered or discussed logically and rationally. There is no element of propagandistic intent.

The issue of hits and views have become trendy ever since The Runs has been bandying figures in the hundred thousands and millions around the net. What lies behind these figures?

Let J’accuse put its cards on the table – there is no denying that the Runs is unarguably (that means without any doubt) the most popular blog (if not website) on the Maltese islands at the moment. At no point in this assessment are we saying or implying (even by the most twisted of conspiracy readings) otherwise. Since we have long held the baton of Maltese quality blogging and plugged the usefulness of the internet (since back in 2005) this discussion is of huge interest to us and whoever cares to see where the next Net Election will go. So here are a few reflections.

1. The Biz vs The Nuge

There’s a reason certain sites or programmes will attract a larger readership (or should I say viewership than others). We have long given the example of Grande Fratello vs Porta a Porta. It has a lot to do with the subject matter of the program/blog. The masses cannot and will not be bothered with depth of reading and will jump at the opportunity of (a) a simple read, (b) one full of juicy gossip that feeds off the hunger for voyeur news that has characterised the end of this decade.

Here’s a simple list of Newspaper circulation figures in the UK for you to crunch (brackets refer to figure in thousands – December 2008):

The Sun (2,899k), The Daily Mail (2,139k), Daily Mirror (1,346k), The Daily Telegraph (824k), Daily Express (728k), Daily Star (725k), The Times (600k), Financial Times (435k), Daily Record (349k), The Guardian (343k),  The Independent (200k) – source Audit Bureau of Circulations

Sun, Mail, Mirror, Express and (breast of all – if you excuse my pun) Star all  trounce the figures of the Times, the FT and (my favourite) the Independent. There is the saving grace (if you are so inclined) of the Telegraph, but on the whole tabloid beats quality by more than a mile. Of course you could deny until blue in the face that this rule does not always apply but it does.

The first reason for high peaks in browsage on a blog is either sensationalism, controversy or the draw of voyeurism. They are all there for a blog owner to plunder if his or her standards allow for it. The web is no different phenomenon from the printed press when it comes to attracting readership. Think back to the first Al Qaeda decapitations circulated on the web. They swiftly became virals. News value? Doubtful. Morbid curiosity? Definitely. It may require an examination of the human psyche in this day and age but it works.

How did it work for Plategate’s figures on the Runs? If you still cannot read it – it is not a hunger to change the system or contribute to the cleansing of some perceived rot. It is the hunger for more of the voyeur gossip. Labour’s bumbling press hooked on to the idea of the “gossip” tag late in the day – and with the usual shot-in-the-foot style of theirs but that does not change this prime mover for the web stats.

Masses do not look for quality – they feed on gossip (their idea of empowerment is being part of the “informed” chain” – what to do with such information is anybody’s guess though).

2. Hits, Misses and Skewered Stats

The eternal debate in blog conferences and advice manuals is how best to boost hits on your blog. When the hit counter is spinning then your blog is sellable – if you are in that kind of market. There are many ways in which one can improve their web traffic. From wikipedia:

Web traffic is measured to see the popularity of web sites and individual pages or sections within a site. Web traffic can be analysed by viewing the traffic statistics found in the web server log file, an automatically-generated list of all the pages served. A hit is generated when any file is served. The page itself is considered a file, but images are also files, thus a page with 5 images could generate 6 hits (the 5 images and the page itself). A page view is generated when a visitor requests any page within the web site – a visitor will always generate at least one page view (the main page) but could generate many more.

There is one thing to bear in mind here: none of these figures reflect the all-important Unique Visitor. Both page views and hits are deceptive when it comes to calculating the number of individuals who are accessing and reading a site. Also hits and views become skewed when web-bots come into play. These are programs trawling the nets for specific words and phrases – hundreds of them pass through a site every day leaving their trace as hits. What really happens is that there is no person behind these bots which could be looking for any phrase from “malta” to “vagina” (and I use this example on purpose).

Another thing is that you might try to use an external site to compare the popularity of websites. These may serve as indicators but never give the whole picture. J’accuse does not claim to have thousands of hits let alone unique visitors. Yet even the closest assessment by external websites fails to take into consideration that J’accuse is hosted on a sub-page (jacquesrenezammit.com/jaccuse) and that a search for hits on the (jacquesrenezammit.com) domain is futile in this respect. www.akkuza.com simply directs readers to the subdomain /jaccuse and is an empty site in itself that is not calculated for the purpose of hits. I have levels of gaging interest and regular readership – subscriptions to RSS feeds, subscribers to the facebook J’accuse page (currently 266) are normally the very regular readers who do not miss a beat.

Then there is the business of sites like Alexa. Here is what wikipedia has to say about that measuring system:

The Alexa measuring system is based on a toolbar that users must choose to install, which can be installed on several browsers including Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, across different operating systems. Sources of bias include both websites whose users disproportionately do not install such toolbars, as well as webmasters who install Alexa Toolbar for the sole purpose of enhancing their ratings. Specifically, Alexa rankings are not part of the notability guidelines for web sites for several reasons:

• Below a certain level, Alexa rankings are essentially meaningless, because of the limited sample size. Alexa itself says that ranks worse than 100,000 are not reliable.
• Alexa rankings vary and include significant systematic bias which means the ratings often do not reflect popularity, but only popularity amongst certain groups of users (See Alexa Internet#Concerns). Broadly, Alexa rates based upon measurements by a user-installed  toolbar, but this is a highly variable tool, and there are large parts of the internet user community (especially corporate users, many advanced users, many open-source and non-Windows users) who do not use it and whose internet reference use is therefore ignored.
• Alexa rankings do not reflect encyclopedic notability and existence of reliable source material if so. A highly ranked web site may well have nothing written about it, or a poorly ranked web site may well have a lot written about it.
• A number of unquestionably notable topics have web sites with poor Alexa rankings.

 

It’s not half as straightforward and it only becomes relevant depending on the purpose you have in mind for your blog. If you subscribe to the argument that no matter how irrational the arguments in your  blog are these are somehow validated by the fact that you have a huge number of hits then alexa and the like are very useful. If on the other hand you are more concerned with quality debate and attracting the discerning readers then one unique visitor with much to say (and maybe contradict) is worth a thousand trolls and elves. As we always say at J’accuse: Give me a Fausto anyday!

Sidenote: The Runs On Unique Visitors

Comment: March 14th 1416hrs

Pat Camilleri:

Daphne,

Since you have roughly 130,000 page views a day in these recent weeks, could you give us the number of unique visitors? Having this data may be a good sample to create a democratic poll of whether people think she should resign or not! Come on, go for it.

[Daphne – I don’t have that information. But thank you for the idea of the poll. We can use a voting system that will register IP numbers and block the same person from voting twice. timesofmalta.com uses that system.]

3. Internet Democracy

Blogs are definitely a tool in today’s democracy. They can and will be used as platforms for discussion as well as an assembly point for group expression. We could make the mistake of overestimating their value in the democratic process. We could dilute their value through misuse – and misinterpret the numbers in a skewered democratic understanding. This has already been done with the inexplicable use of Facebook Groups as some form of supposed democratic expression of the masses.

Next time you read about some bully figures ask yourself the relevant question. In this case its not whether those figures are true or not but really why are they being used.

I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid… you’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.