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Site Meter reports that this blog had it's 10,000th visitor yesterday. Woot! After a short celebration lasting all of 3 seconds, I began asking myself where all of these people are coming from. Fortunately Sitemeter had an answer to that as well. They show the last 100 referrals to my site, that is the URLs of the sites where somebody clicked on a link which directed him to here. Many of these referrals are shown as "unknown". These are either coming from sites which for some reason don't give out the referral information, or from people that visit my site using a link in their favorites, or typing in my URL.

Unsurprisingly the main source of visitors are search engines. One the one hand that is good news, I seem to rank reasonably good on these. Google says I have a page rank of 4 out of 10, whatever that means. On the other hand the links show what search terms were used to find me, and I can't help but thinking that many of these people didn't really want to come here. For example I've seen at least two visits from people that were looking for "free MMORPGs", and just arrived here because I used both the words "free" and "MMORPGs" somewhere.

The other big source of referrals is links from other blogs. Special mention goes to Broken Toys, not only because that is the top blog referrer, but also because it is a honor to be linked from there. Broken Toys is the blog of Scott Jennings, formerly known as Lum the Mad. "The Rantings of Lum the Mad" was probably the first MMORPG "blog" ever, years before the word "blog" had even been invented. The site became reasonably famous in the still young world of MMORPGs, and Scott got a job as developer for Mythic Entertainment, makers of Dark Age of Camelot. He is now not so mad any more, and instead of rantings is now running a well-read blog on MMOs and life in general.

Now I'm probably breaking some unwritten bloggers code of honor by not having a sidebar linking back to all the blogs that link to me. Sorry if that offends anybody. But I am not actually trying to become part of some network and pushing up the number of visits to this site. Oh yes, and that means you can stop sending me spam on how to increase my Google ranking and whatever. And I'm certainly not interested in "getting rich through advertising". Being an old cynic, I never believed in the internet economy trying to make money out of "eyeballs" *yuck*. Look at it this way: If I had put up banner ads to make money from my writings, what would that have earned me? 10,000 visits with a click-through rate of about 1% makes 100 clicks on the ads. Then each click is worth maybe 1 cent, and I would have made the whopping fortune of $1. No thanks. If you ever see banner ads on this site, they would be from Blogspot, who are hosting this blog for free.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:56 AM Permanent Link