I’ve had a few of conversations with colleagues in the past week about how many people read this blog, and it made me think I should do some proper analysis rather than rely on off the top of my head numbers. I’m sharing the results of this analysis here today.
Most weekdays I see between 20 to 50 page views on the site. Weekends are often in single digits. The biggest day was around 250, but days greater than 100 are rare. I can see how many people click on links and therefore generate multiple page views – as a result I’d estimate around 80-90% of people visiting read one story only per visit. What I can’t estimate is people who come to the homepage and read multiple recent posts as this only counts as one page view; and this is a good proportion of the total traffic. As the homepage viewers outnumber the link clickers, it should be safe to assume that page views on this blog can be taken as a proxy for the minimum actual unique visitors, and that posts read by those visitors must average a number fractionally above one. As I’ve probably been averaging around 3 new posts a week over the past few months, I’ll estimate from the website approximately 60 readers per post.
Regarding subscribers, most of them wouldn’t come to the website very often as I’ve set up the email and RSS feed in a way that delivers full content; therefore I’m confident I am not double counting. Many other website feeds only show the first one or two paragraphs as a teaser to generate traffic to the site, but personally I find this annoying when it happens to me and on more than one occassion it has resulted in me unsubscribing from a blog feed. At the time of writing this post, the number of subscribers via Feedburner showed up as 37, but a few weeks ago it was over 40. As the drop occurred in a week where I was too busy to make even one new post, I conclude (large margin of error) that RSS subscribers have a low tolerance for people like me taking up valuable screen real estate, and it is they and not email subscribers that will pull the plug pretty quickly if the content is not updated frequently. I’m guessing email subscibers are more likely to unsubscribe if there is more frequent content that is boring or not relevant to them; if I’m not posting, then they won’t be reminded to unsubscribe as they’ll receive nothing. How many subscribers actually read each post is hard to know for sure; I’ll take an educated guess based upon some limited stats I receive plus anecdotal feedback which would indicate around 50 – 75%. Forwarding of subscriber emails you will never capture, but I doubt this number is anything significant. So let’s assume around 20 subscribers read each post – this may be a little conservative. For those reading this blog regularly and who haven’t subscribed, you can click here if you feel so inclined.
Based on the numbers above I get a rough estimate of 80 people reading each post. Some of these people are clearly competitors, colleagues and other bloggers. As an almost total stab in the dark I’m guessing that they in total account for 30%, leaving around 70% as airline employees, but this is the weakest part of my analysis in this entire post. Part of this estimate is driven by the number of airline employees I meet who tell me they have read the blog without any prompting from me, but clearly there is a much larger number of airline executives in my target market who have never read it! Someone telling you they read the blog gives you no indication of whether that means once or frequently, but it is still always nice to hear, especially when it comes from someone working for an airline internet site or call centre. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this blog has had a positive impact on my job, as customers and prospects that read my posts are usually much more willing to engage in a wider range of conversational topics when I meet them. As a result, the selling process becomes much more consultative rather than adversarial, and both sides win.
When I started the Shearwater Blog in January 2009 I said I’d give it a year and then reassess my committment to blogging. The content is very targetted at a specific group, and my job has expanded to cover much more than direct channels these days, but I continue enjoying writing here very much. I’ve definintely noticed that dropping the posting frequency from 5 times a week earlier this year to approximately 3 posts a week these days has dramatically slowed down any growth in readership. I’m guessing that if I drop below 2 posts per week it may start going backwards, so I’ll wait until the end of the year, look at number of readers at that point along with my overall job responsibilities, and then make a decision for 2010. Thanks very much for reading.
November 15, 2009 at 7:16 pm
I read
November 16, 2009 at 11:28 am
I used to get about 300-400 page views a day. Average one page per visitor. Then I added in the syndicated material (which was hard to get from the 4 sites who syndicate) and the RSS. Then I went and did a 6 month unique visitor views analysis on just the published pages and was very surprised to see that there was a small core of people who read the site on a regular basis (about 400 per week) but the total for the 6 months was closer to 10,000. Making a total page views served over 40,000 again according to Googles Analytics. If I then added in RSS currently about 500 registered and the syndicated it could be about double that.
I also benefit from contributing unique content from different sources which is published in different variants of either newsletters or blogs. I am not accounting for Twitter yet.
Hope this helps
Cheers
Timothy
November 16, 2009 at 11:41 am
Alex and Timothy, thanks for the comments. I’ve seen the Google Analytics reports for other sites, and you get a lot more information than I have access to at the moment. But then again, blogging is really just a hobby for me rather than a serious commercial venture, so I’ll be happy to leave the world domination to others. I suppose I’ll stick to my own little niche for now. For me, the most intersting part of the above analysis was how quickly the RSS subscribers dropped off when I stopped updating for a week. In the past when I’ve gone on holiday I’ve explicity mentioned this in a post and the subscribers stayed, but give the impression you may have quit blogging, and they head straight for the door. I’ve got no idea if others have seen any similar effect? The other interesting observation (and this applies to most blogs) is that I know airline employees read this, but they very rarely comment.
November 16, 2009 at 6:48 pm
I think your content quality is very high and as more become aware, they will start reading your blog.
November 25, 2009 at 1:57 am
Martin – I read too and am enjoying. I my view the secret to blogging is to write for yourself. If the audience comes it is a bonus. With RSS, syndication, tweeting and more it is impossible to judge numbers.