“BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/ which appears to be one of the top 5 weblogs on the Internet (by “these”:http://www.technorati.com/live/top100.html “measures”:http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs “at least”:http://www.blogstreet.com/top100.html) has “announced”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/03/boing_boing_traffic_.html it is publishing its full traffic statistics. It’s as good a way as any to get an idea of the ‘upper bound’ of popularity of weblogs as a phenomenon. Their traffic has nearly tripled in the last nine months and in November they had 1,182,402 ‘unique visitors’ (though how you would compare that to conventional media I don’t know – a visit to a weblog doesn’t seem to me equivalent in significance to the purchase of a magazine, say).
Depressingly, the top four search terms used to find their site are ‘anal’, ‘hentai’, ‘porno’ (and ‘boing’). My top five are “interesting facts”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_interesting_facts.html, “free ocr”:https://blog.org/archives/001249.html, “basic origami”:https://blog.org/archives/000176.html, “am I going down”:https://blog.org/archives/000223.html (bafflingly) and, of course, ‘blog’. There’s a lot about my own statistics that I have to admit puzzles me. For example why is it I have so many Dutch readers? My stats suggest I have half as many Dutch visitors as I have (identifiable) UK ones. And what is it you want to find when you visit? Are you getting what you want?
P.S. If Boing Boing are in the mood for more disclosure I’d be interested to know what their financial situation is like. It must take a few $$$ to pay for a connection that can transmit 469.29 GB of data a month…
