The Daily Blog is has congratulated itself for a record month of hits last month, beating Kiwiblog on the April Open Parachute blog ranking, the first time a left wing blog has done this.

Milestone for The Daily Blog

For the first time in NZ Blogging history, Kiwiblog has been beaten by a left wing blog.

…few people believe Whaleoil’s numbers are real, so Kiwiblog has been number 1 or 2 since the blog rankings began and this is the first time it’s been third.

Many thanks to our readership and our bloggers.

Fair enough. Something they can be proud of. But this was due to one thing, the Amanda Bailey/John Key ponytail pulling story. With the right stories it’s easy enough to get spikes in numbers. It’s much harder to sustain those numbers.

Here’s the numbers for the last few months:

• September: visits 504,304 page views 813,779
• October: visits 210,877 page views 347,647
• November: visits 160,716 page views 259,736
• December: visits 126,534 page views 203,1264
• January 2015: visits 116,155 page views 188,868
• February visits 121,994 page views 205,870
• March visits 163,445 page views 274,075
• April: visits 353,964 page views 511,527

So April was over double March.

Weepus Beard commented:

Congrats on the visits/month stat, and the statistics king David Farrar will be seething at his demotion.

I’m surprised he hasn’t congratulated TDB himself but then he only comments on/misrepresents stats that support his own narrow, right wing view of the world. He deliberately ignores/misrepresents any stats which damages that view or supports any socially responsible view of the world.

Strange to turn congratulations for The Daily Blog into baseless diss of Farrar. And it should be noted that The Daily Blog beat Kiwiblog on just one of the two measures.

• Kiwiblog April 2015: visits 311,709 page views 566,587

Kiwiblog still had 10% more page views. And Open Parachute is just one way of ranking sites. Currently Alexa shows:

• Kiwiblog – rank in New Zealand 273, global rank 135,533
• The Daily Blog – rank in New Zealand 868, global rank 283,412
• The Standard – rank in New Zealand 1,489, global rank 364,133
• Whale Oil – rank in New Zealand 138, global rank 79,442

Weepus Beard continues:

I’d like to say though that these very encouraging views per month are not translating into comments. The heart of a blog is in it’s commentators and some improvements could be made on the back of this result.

TDB authors are the equal and in some cases way better than The Standard authors but this does not seem to make much of a difference.

I’m not qualified in blog studies to know what improvements might be made to increase the number of comments left here at TDB.

There’s a number of major reasons why The Daily Blog usually gets significantly fewer comments than The Standard and Kiwiblog.

Weepus Beard comes up with one of them:

Aha! I think I’ve got it. One of the reasons why TDB visits do not translate into comments is…

…real socially conscious people with real social,ly conscious comments to make do not like their having their comments stuck in moderation for hours upon hours as if we were mistrusted right wing trolls.

No one likes their comments going straight into limbo, having to wait until a moderator gets around to publishing it.

That’s if they release it. The Daily Blog has a reputation for ‘disappearing’ comments that it doesn’t like. Martyn Bradbury has been known as a site censor and comment manipulator for a long time.

And:

• It takes time to build up a commenting community (especially with the above practices). The Standard and Kiwiblog have been going much longer than The Daily Blog, and people tend to stay with what they are familiar unless there’s a compelling reason to switch favourite commenting communities.
• The Daily Blog’s target market tends far left. Bradbury has associated himself with small parties and narrow interests, like Mana and the Internet Party. The Standard has Labour and Green and Mana supporters, a much wider catchment.
• Bradbury has a credibility problem, often being an over the top ranter who is wide of the mark in his claims and predictions.
• After the disappointment of the last election there was much less frequent posting at The Daily Blog.Number of posts is a significant factor in number of visits, number of views and number of comments.

The Daily Blog deserves some statistical glory for their April results, but that doesn’t mean it will become a sustained recovery. See what May’s rankings are to see how much it settles back, unless they manage to break another big story.