As soon as I saw this headline at The Daily Blog – Blog Rankings: TDB second largest blog in NZ – I knew what bollocks it was about.
And that bollocks continued in their lead paragraph and article.
The latest blog rankings are out, The Standard are no longer making their stats publicly available to Ken for the blog rankings and that makes The Daily Blog the second largest blog…
This election we intend to bring you commentary you can’t get in the right wing corporate mainstream media.
Last month lprent said he was ditching Sitemeter that Open Parachute basis it’s rankings on so is now off the list.
Looks like I might have to cut statcounter (one of our trackers) out of the site. It looks like they may be having some problems.
For a start, we’ve been getting some delays from statcounter over the last month not responding and slowing the page loads down. Something that is frigging irritating bearing in mind that only reason for having a visible tracker is to provide the Open Parachute ranking.
I’ll watch statcounter to the end of the month. If they continue to screw up then I’ll remove their drag on the site.
He must have discontinued before the end of the month. That doesn’t suddenly make The Standard smaller than TDB.
In March The Standard was slightly ahead of TDB in visits and well ahead (50% higher) in page views.
And Whale Oil will still be larger than any of these blogs by clicks. They dropped Sitemeter early last year.
Sitemeter and Open parachute have had obvious inaccuracies as well, so at best they are a rough comparative guide on those blogs that participate – many don’t, including a number of the biggest.
And I suspect some sites like Whale Oil and The Daily Blog are designed to force more clicks to be able to read full content.
And there’s other things that mess around with the numbers too. For example Alexa has some odd percentage of visitor numbers for TDB:
- New Zealand 55.8%
- France 17.8%
- United States 7%
- India 3.8%
That seems very low for New Zealand. Here it’s 77.3%, Kiwiblog is 77.5%, The Standard is 70.7%, Whale Oil is 63.8%.
All Open Parachute does is give blogs like The Daily Blog some bragging rights and a performance hit.
I’ve never cared about relative rankings here, I’m more interested in maintaining a manageable size with ease of use more important than click harvesting.