Kos Traffic Numbers Inflated by 60%

by Patrick Ruffini :: October 3rd, 2007 1:20 am

Yesterday, I had the good “fortune” of being frontpaged on Daily Kos. The post sat atop the site for two hours. According to Google Analytics, the link produced 1,164 visitors yesterday.

For the traffic behemoth Kos is portrayed as, that seems low, especially since he linked to two posts of mine. I went and looked at other notable traffic spikes this year, and this one isn’t really even close to some other blockbuster links. For instance,

• A Marc Ambinder link (linked to by Andrew Sullivan) to my 2008 Wire videowall produced 2,205 visits on June 5th.

• A link from the Real Clear Politics homepage on August 17th produced 1,889 visits.

Now, Kos was semi-complimentary in his link. He wasn’t direct in telling his readers to rape and pillage my servers. And I know well that the wording of a link and how it’s presented can dramatically impact the clickthrough rate. If there’s a site I need to link to but I don’t want to reward with lots of traffic, I hyperlink certain words and not others to minimize clickthrough (in addition to sticking in a rel=”nofollow” directive).

But this got me thinking, especially since a sub-theme in the linked post suggested Kos was not all he was cracked up to be in terms of his audience size.

Earlier today, it was pointed out to me that Kos’s average visit length was all of 2 seconds, suggesting either a coordinated attempt to bomb the site with fake traffic or an extremely low level of engagement on the part of his readers. This seemed as remarkable, given the breathless huffing and puffing about his community platform being a game changer in terms of traffic and audience reach.

So I started to do some digging around his SiteMeter stats and those of other big bloggers.

My source was right. The SiteMeter numbers are indeed fishy. But the reason is far from nefarious: a design flaw in how SiteMeter counts visits that systemically overcounts unique visitors on extremely high traffic blogs like Daily Kos… by a lot.

First of all, I looked at the Detail view showing the last 100 visitors. Overwhelmingly it showed visitors hitting the site only once, with a visit time of zero (you need to hit a second page for it to register any time spent). Contrasted with my traffic, with an average visit length of three minutes, this seemed highly improbable.

Then it hit me: SiteMeter only accounts for the last 100 visitors individually. On a site like Daily Kos, the 100th most recent visitor could have been 15 seconds ago. If you are the 101st most recent visitor and you click on a new page, you are counted as a new unique visitor in SiteMeter’s all important count. On a normal site, this wouldn’t matter, since it’s highly unlikely you’ll stick around long enough to have 100 others show up after you. On a site with hundreds of thousands of page views a day, it’s extremely likely you will.

Other corroborating evidence of this includes the Daily Durations chart and the Page View / Visitor chart by hour. During slow traffic periods (early mornings and weekends) the ratio of page views to uniques returns to more normal levels (up to about 5 to 3). Also there is an odd spike in daily durations up to 3 seconds from 2 that only happens on weekends and is very consistent — a spike that you don’t see on medium traffic blogs. What you see there is a telltale sign of the longer time horizon required for double counting (and triple and so on).

Currently, Kos’s average daily “visit” count stands at about 454,000 and his daily page views at 538,000, a low 1.18 ratio. This number has fed the huge mythology surrounding Kos that he has “half a million” readers a day (I used the number 600,000 as recently as 48 hours ago), while top conservatives are stuck in the muck at about 100,000 to 150,000. These are the numbers used to populate N.Z. Bear’s frequently referenced traffic ranking.

We now know that the only thing we can trust about the SiteMeter numbers are the page views. And from that we can arrive at a more realistic number of daily unique visitors for Daily Kos and other leading blogs.

How so? The best guide we probably have are other netroots blogs like MyDD (stats) and OpenLeft (stats) built on open community platforms. They have low enough traffic that SiteMeter’s inflationary effect is minimal at best. Using Scoop (what Kos uses) and SoapBlox respectively, both have a ratio of about 1.9 page views for every visit (itself a less stringent measure than “unique visitor”). On Red State, where there is likely a little bit of this effect, it’s about 1.8 to 1. On a Wordpress-style blog without diaries, the ratio averages 1.5 page views per visit.

Extrapolating from Kos’ page view number, a more accurate “visitor” number for Kos would be in the neighborhood of 283,000. If Kos is a stickier site than MyDD or OpenLeft (a fair assumption), that number is probably lower. That works out to an artificial inflation in the accepted Daily Kos traffic number of about 60%.

By the way, this is not some theoretical exercise. This is the number SiteMeter would show if they didn’t have this quirk in counting traffic to high-velocity sites. Sites with as more traffic than Kos show a similar skew. That includes gadget and lifestyle blogs like Gizmodo with 2 million page views and a 1 second visit length and Lifehacker at 3 seconds.

To be fair, some conservative blogs probably fall in this boat, though the skew is probably no more than 20-30% in the most extreme case simply because we don’t fall in quite the same traffic league as Kos. Most author-led blogs average about 1.5 page views per visit, and that would peg Michelle Malkin’s actual visit number at about 130,000 (down from 140K). In effect, that means Kos is twice the size of Michelle. That’s not something you’d necessarily want to hang your hat on, but it is dramatically different than the 4 or 5 to 1 number that is in reporters’ minds (and was in mine until tonight). So we still have a hill to climb, but it doesn’t look quite as big as it did 24 hours ago.

Why does this matter? Because if someone uncovered a 60% ratings inflation in Rush Limbaugh’s or Bill O’Reilly’s numbers, we’d never hear the end of it.

Tagged: blogosphere conservatism kos netroots

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