I'm not much for looking at site statistics. Way I see it, I'm never going to be an A-list blogger because, among other reasons, I don't stick to one subject or area of expertise, I don't blog often enough or regularly enough to merit an increase in readership, and I don't talk enough about comics so I think a lot of those readers wandered off. Like I said back when I first started Pen-Elayne on the Web, I will have considered this blog a personal success if I have as many regular readers as I did back when I self-published INSIDE JOKE, which was around 200 people every six weeks. And I got up around that number fairly quickly so I'm happy. Except I'd like more time to blog about comics.
But I digress. Robin amuses himself occasionally by checking out my site stats. As we know, these numbers are based on how many readers actually visit the blog, which is not the same thing as how many people actually read it. How do I know this? Because I don't visit blogs that often, I read everything via RSS feed to my Bloglines newsreader. And I have to figure a lot of other busy folks do the same. At present, as far as I know all the accepted forms of ranking blog popularity seem to rely on various site meters, and there's no way to measure how many people read my (or any) blog via a newsreader rather than clicking to the site.
So is there a way to figure out one's true readership? Well, when I was doing my Estrogen Month posts, part of the participation request involved people having to check out my sidebar to make sure they didn't vote for any women who were already on my blogroll. Robin noted a sharp rise in my daily stats, by about a third, that corresponded with these posts. After Estrogen Month was over my site visits dropped to where they'd been previously, and I'm inclined to think that's more a function of newsreaders than of a drop-off in posting frequency (although that dipped as well).
So if any of you out there want to figure out what your true readership is as opposed to what your site meters say it is, you might want to try doing the kind of thing I did last month - do something that involves people having to visit your blog, keep it up for a regular enough period of time (say, a week), then compare stats from before, during and after. One of the easier ways to do this if you're on Blogger is to set your site feed from "full" to "partial" so that people have to click on your blog to see your entire post, but unless this is your preferred way of doing things I wouldn't recommend it, as some of us who use newsreaders tend to give up on partial posts if we're busy, and just skim the blog rather than clicking to read the rest of the post.
But I digress. Robin amuses himself occasionally by checking out my site stats. As we know, these numbers are based on how many readers actually visit the blog, which is not the same thing as how many people actually read it. How do I know this? Because I don't visit blogs that often, I read everything via RSS feed to my Bloglines newsreader. And I have to figure a lot of other busy folks do the same. At present, as far as I know all the accepted forms of ranking blog popularity seem to rely on various site meters, and there's no way to measure how many people read my (or any) blog via a newsreader rather than clicking to the site.
So is there a way to figure out one's true readership? Well, when I was doing my Estrogen Month posts, part of the participation request involved people having to check out my sidebar to make sure they didn't vote for any women who were already on my blogroll. Robin noted a sharp rise in my daily stats, by about a third, that corresponded with these posts. After Estrogen Month was over my site visits dropped to where they'd been previously, and I'm inclined to think that's more a function of newsreaders than of a drop-off in posting frequency (although that dipped as well).
So if any of you out there want to figure out what your true readership is as opposed to what your site meters say it is, you might want to try doing the kind of thing I did last month - do something that involves people having to visit your blog, keep it up for a regular enough period of time (say, a week), then compare stats from before, during and after. One of the easier ways to do this if you're on Blogger is to set your site feed from "full" to "partial" so that people have to click on your blog to see your entire post, but unless this is your preferred way of doing things I wouldn't recommend it, as some of us who use newsreaders tend to give up on partial posts if we're busy, and just skim the blog rather than clicking to read the rest of the post.
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