Sitemeter, Shmitemeter...how about Compete's #s?

Micah L. Sifry — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:51:39 -0400

If you read the comment thread here
you will see that Patrick's had a busy evening defending his analysis of how Sitemeter tracks traffic.

But let's look at Patrick's larger conclusion. If he's right about visit inflation on DailyKos, then maybe the left blogosphere isn't that much bigger than the right blogosphere. (And maybe advertisers should spend less money on the left's big sites, right?)

But while Patrick argues that his analysis suggests that Kos's readership is perhaps only twice the size of Michelle Malkin's, take a look at the head-to-head, apples-to-apples, comparison provided by Compete.com: It suggests that Kos had nearly three times as many unique visitors as Malkin in August, the last month tracked: nearly 500,000 compared to about 180,000. (On the other hand, Compete also suggests that Kos had a total of 1.8 million visits that month, a daily readership of about 60,000. Malkin's daily readership is estimated at almost 26,000 by Compete.)

The bottom line: all these numbers are fuzzy. What probably matters more is what people do on and through these sites. I don't think anyone would argue that in that department, the DailyKos community is far larger and more impactful than any other political site.

Sitemeter is right

pb — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:12:24 -0400

See detailed analysis here.

Patrick Ruffini is misunderstanding the difference between what SiteMeter shows you on a summary page, and what is counted as a visit or a hit.

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Sitemeter, Shmitemeter...how about Compete's #s?

Sitemeter is right