I've got an interesting question about a top conservative blog...

[nashuaadvocate]

Glenn Reynolds' "InstaPundit.com" claims to get over 180,000 unique visitors a day. And if you check their SiteMeter.com button (on the website), that claim is confirmed.

But when The Nashua Advocate recently was linked to on InstaPundit.com, we received no more hits as a result of that link--in fact, far less--than we receive when linked to on a less-trafficked site, like, say, BuzzFlash.com (approximately 7,500 unique visitors a day, or 1/25th the traffic of InstaPundit.com).

Then we went to InstaPundit's SiteMeter.com statistics and saw that the average visit to InstaPundit.com--lauded as a top blog worthy of note (on TV, in the newspapers, etc.) by conservatives--is three seconds long.

To repeat: The AVERAGE length of a unique visitor's visit to InstaPundit.com is three seconds.

Which means, for every person who spends even five seconds on the site, there's another person who spends ONE SECOND on the site.

Now, The Nashua Advocate averages 1 minute, 43 seconds per visit. A site like Mystery Pollster (which receives 380 visitors a day, as compared to The Advocate's approximately 2,000) averages a 1 minute, 25 second visit per unique visitor.

Is there funny business going on here? Is this conservative blogger using some mechanism to artificially inflate his hits, and therefore his popularity and his influence on the political culture?

Has anyone ever investigated this before? Or am I missing something (maybe someone who knows computers well can enlighten me)?

The News Editor

[rniel]

1. Some hits can be explained

I have heard that search engine robots go through pages to index them sometimes and that would explain some of the 1 second hits. I know I have seen strange hits on one of our sites that turned out to be the robots.

[nashuaadvocate]

4. Agreed, but wouldn't that phenomenon apply to all blogs equally? nt

[Oreo]

2. Very interesting

What about our friend in MN Mr Hindrocket and his powerline blog? Any similarities?

I look forward to hearing you again on AAR Minnesota!

[Canuckistanian]

3. What about a comparison to say, Daily Kos or Atrios?

Is this just a blog peculiarity?

[nashuaadvocate]

5. Good question...we should investigate this. nt (I'll check Kos)

[nashuaadvocate]

6. Well...

...DailyKos is 4 seconds on average. Then again, his site has a different format (with hundreds of different "diarists"). So it's easier to understand that result.

I'll keep looking; I'm just wondering if there is an "easy" explanation for this, or if InstaPundit is cheating, or if, even, all the "major" blogs have some mechanism that they use (wittingly or unwittingly) to increase hits.

-- TNE

[roguevalley]

7. could be they scan the headlines and leave.

[tom_paine]

8. Consider Poll Freeping and the rest of the Bushevik Philosophy

that basically condones lying, cheating, stealing, fraud, etc. provided you are doing it to Enemies of the State and For Their Own Good To Fight a Greater Evil (you know, the same kind of evil the Nazis accused the Jews of), I would find it not in the least remarkable.

[Skinner]

9. SiteMeter doesn't count visitors properly.

I think the problem is that their software is not set up to handle high-traffic websites. It will accurately count the number of visitors if you are getting 50 page views a day. But if you get a hundred thousand, SiteMeter counts almost every page view as a visit.

It's completely wrong. And a lot of Bloggers are using it to massively inflate their numbers. I do not know if these bloggers know SiteMeter is wrong. I hope that they are making an honest mistake.

We set SiteMeter up on DU, and it was saying that we got hundreds of thousands of visits per day. And the average visit was approximately one second. I know our real stats, and we ain't getting hundreds of thousands of visits per day. We're getting more like tens of thousands. And the average visit length is way longer than one second.

We actually had intense arguments here in the office about whether we should make our SiteMeter stats public so we could show that we were getting way more visits than *EVERYONE* else. We finally decided that it was unethical to make the SiteMeter stats public if we knew they were not correct.

[moggie12]

11. There you go again - acting ethically again

How would the right wing function if they did such a thing?

[nashuaadvocate]

13. Thanks!

Skinner,

Thanks! That answers my question perfectly! I knew I was missing something.

Right now The Advocate is still at a point where our stats seem to accurately reflect our daily traffic.

May we be so blessed as to reach a point, at some time in the future, when the two figures are out of synch due to an inordinate volume of traffic. :-)

Anyway, if we do ever get there, we'll certainly have to re-evaluate our use of SiteMeter.com. Thanks for the heads up!

And thanks to all the rest of you for your help,

-- TNE

[sacxtra]

10. Site meters can be hacked, with a simple bash script and wget

or in DOS, OR BASIC


-- EXAMPLE ---
100 EXEC wget http://target.com/sitemeter.pl
GOTO 100

let that run for awhile. Use some proxies.

Muahahahahaha!

[rinsd]

12. Site meters can be inaccurate....

Insty doesn't need to inflate his numbers, he's defintely at the top of the food chain with Kos as the most read blogs.

Seems like you decided to start a blog war, got dumped on and didn't even get the traffic out of it which is supposed to be the point of said blog war. That sucks.

[nashuaadvocate]

14. LOL

Actually, we didn't think he'd respond at all (in fact we were reasonably certain of it) and therefore had absolutely no expectation of increased traffic.

Besides which, we're pretty happy with our traffic right now, and only criticize other blogs (big or small) when the need arises.

Dumped on? (Shrug). Says you. We feel fantastic.

-- TNE