Huh, what?

*cough*

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

So… where are the companion blogs to the Daily “Screw’Em” Kos and why doesn’t their traffic reflect the same symbiotic relationship?

Further, it wasn’t so long ago a number of lefty blogs were exposed for inflating their stats. Who says such lessons went unlearned?

Finally… if 1/2 million people visit the Daily “Screw’Em” Kos daily why do so few attend their “convention”?

Well, it’s happened before. The fuss over Google’s “click through” fraud is still reverberating.

Why get into the semantics? Kos = libs. Of course they are exaggerating. That’s what they do…

unamused on October 4, 2007 at 8:00 PMM

Kinda like “Internet inches” …

On the other hand, it is nice to know that when the KosKids are finally stirred up enough by the Ruthuglican Theokkkracy to start the revolution, it’s going to turn out to be just a couple dozen art majors and a score of geriatric Sausalito attorneys who wear bandannas and Dead shirts on the weekends.

While I find the ad revenue thing interesting, your point above is the gold in this story to me.
Remember, this isn’t just a blog, it’s a movement. It attracts Presidential candidates to it’s convention. It owns the Democratic party!
So yeah, I’d be thrilled to find out that they aren’t as big as they think they are/claim to be. I don’t like their influence on politics, and I’d be happy for Democratic government officials to realize it’s ok to stop pandering to them.

It would have to be, it’s so bloody boring, and not reader friendly at all… not that I go there often, but sheesh it’s awful.

We ended up installing our own counter to count visits to our web site our way. We can’t compare the results to anything else, but our counter does tell us which of our catalog pages people look at…and how much looking they do…when they buy our products. We can only prove that this picture works for us on our site.

I hate being wrong. But I was wrong.

The only thing it could look at is the ‘referer’ [sic] to determine whether the user came to the page by clicking on an internal or external link.

Anybody spending sweet cash money for ads is going to have some metric by which to analyze the cost effectiveness of the ad in whatever different media it is placed. I seriously doubt the free version of SiteMeter is the basis of that metric.

The inaccuracy of SiteMeter has been well known since before I started blogging, but the inaccuracy is global, so it serves its purpose as a comparative tool, like a bar graph with no scale– you can still tell which one is bigger.

Ruffini’s most interesting observation is that the error appears to be exponential and not linear– which is worth a “hmmm, interesting!”, but the basic truth still remains. HotAir = big. Kos = bigger.

On the other hand, it is nice to know that when the KosKids are finally stirred up enough by the Ruthuglican Theokkkracy to start the revolution, it’s going to turn out to be just a couple dozen art majors and a score of geriatric Sausalito attorneys who wear bandannas and Dead shirts on the weekends.

Whatever Kos’s actual numbers, it’s safe to say that he’s as big as Instapundit and MM combined. Which is pretty darned big.

But this includes all those Diaries, no? Between diaries and other bloggers at Kos, they have a huge staff, right? Here it’s pretty much just you and Bryan.

The only way to prove this on our end would be to compare our SiteMeter stats to the other stat programs we use.

That wouldn’t really prove anything, because different stats packages use different metrics for “visit.” It’s not a standardized thing. This might be able to test the hypothesis: put a free SM counter and a “pro” SM counter on the same high traffic site. Check for any significant difference in the numbers the two counters report.

But there’s a gotcha there — they counters may conflict. Might be easiest to just ask SiteMeter what’s up.

Ali-Bubba on October 4, 2007 at 7:12 PM

Actualy looks worse than that…

Looks as though sitemeter only keeps track of 100 IP adds at a time… so if I’m still in the site, wait until 100 other IPs do somthing… then click into a new window, or even refresh, it counts me as a new visitor.

Add in frequent flyers like I am here… where when I’m in a thread I refresh every few minutes to see responses… and sitemeter becomes a horrible measure of amount of discrete visits, or visitors.

My guess is that Kos has about 1/10 of the amount of visitors as they say they have… because if there is 200 or 300 discrete visitors there at any one time, base sitemeter will see ANYTHING they do as a new visitor.

A better measure would be to just count the Opening or homepage of the site… but then you would still count people refreshing the home page as discrete visits…

It sounds like he navigated away from Hewitt’s site during that three-minute period and then came back — which would, certainly, make the second visit a separate visit.

Not necessarily. Not that it matters, I was able to reproduce his result (without navigating away). I don’t know that it’s conclusive proof, but it is certainly an unexpected result. I’m going to talk to SiteMeter and see if I can get some clarification.

Most important — in terms of DailyKos traffic’s value to its advertisers — is what might be called “the hover factor.” That is to say, diarists and frequent commenters who return to the site several times daily to see who has commented on their diary, or who has responded to their comment.

If Kos is counting such visits as “unique” — when in fact they are multiple daily visits by a relatively small hard core of devoted Kossacks — then that translates to a HUGE inflation of the DKos audience.

And I’m pretty sure that’s the situation.

Makes me wonder if M’s new “live” capability could be used, somehow, for further experimentation.

And just because it is big, does not mean that it is not filled mostly with emptiness (empty heads, empty logic, blogs empty of rational thought, etc).