Who reads this?

A blog is a curious thing, half private diary, half publication. I'm writing for myself first, and for the people who like to read what I write second. But occasionally I wonder just how many readers I have, and click on the Sitemeter button on the bottom of this page. Doing this today, I first thought that my WoW journal must be a smash hit: There is a visible upwards trend in visits and page views, and the March numbers are the second highest after my 15 minutes of fame last October, when I was slashdotted.

But then I started to have doubts about this apparent success, and I checked the referrals. Very different picture there. 9 out of 10 visitors come to my site having searched for some MMORPG related terms on Google. Writing a WoW journal just results in my site being on the first page when you google for things like "iron deposits wow".

I'd like to think that the guy searching for those iron deposits found some helpful information in my journal, but chances are he didn't bother to read much of it. And I probably disappointed the people googling for cheats, bots, or macros for different games, because I might talk about those, without ever offering any for download. Still, there is a small chance of people coming here by accident and finding they like what they see, thus staying on as readers. But looking at the search terms, I had to conclude that that chance is indeed very small.

That still left me wondering how many people are actually reading this. So I turned to another report from Sitemeter, giving some details of the last 100 visits, including how long they spent reading my blog. From the last 100 visitors, only 4 spent more than 5 minutes on my site (with the record being 17 minutes). I'll count those 4 as "readers". Another 8 spent more than a second, but less than 5 minutes (average around 1 minute) on my site, lets call these "browsers". And the remaining 88 percent spent less than a second on my blog, having seen with one look that they were on the wrong site.

Extrapolated to the about 2500 visits (3000 page views) from the last month that would mean about 100 of these hits were readers, and 200 browsers, with the remaining 2200 being in the "lost" category. That goes some way to answer my question about the number of people actually reading this. But it also makes me wonder if the huge amount of lost people are just a sign of the times being fleeting, or whether I somehow managed to create an especially non-retaining click-through site. As far as people are able to judge the quality of my site in less than a second. Scared of too many words?
- posted by Tobold @ 1:12 PM Permanent Link