Tobold's Blog
Sunday, January 15, 2006
 
I don't understand the internet

The internet is a really strange place. This blog got up to a hundred visits a day in the last year. But the "hidden quest" post got over 2,000 hits on Friday, due to being linked to by IGN (WoWVault). Why that post, and not one of the others? Frankly, I don't consider it to be one of the better ones I've written. It wasn't exactly news, just a compilation of stuff already known.

Well, that was just a short episode, and as the link drops of WoWVault's front page the hits are getting fewer and fewer. And interest was short-lived anyway. According to Sitemeter the average visitor read nothing more than the hidden quest page, didn't even look at what else was available on the blog main page, and left after 45 seconds of reading that short post. I just hope that one or the other found the post interesting enough to come back and read the other stuff.
Comments:
It's called information overflow. There are so many sites on the internet but so little time, not to mention most of the people that came to your blog were MMORPG players.

How do commercial fansites like IGN's WoW Vault attract visitors? With catchy headlines such as hidden quests that will interest their target audience of course. There are possibly dozens of such news everywhere and most visitors will not have the time/ could not be bothered to browse through each and everyone of them thoroughly.

I am one of those that found your blog from those links but keep coming back.
 
I imagine a lot of the individual blog spaces around would see the same trends. My own has been steadily increasing over 2005, but it spiked a lot in December probably because of the NGE thing I wrote. And I wouldn't have even known that except you wrote this, so it compelled me to dig into Webstatistics a bit with my host.

One thing I will say is that I am sort of disappointed with phpNews. I had to say "probably because of the NGE" above because there's no way to tell if people came for that specific article or something else that happened in December.

I also notice that most of referrals are actually from Google for some reason.
 
A while ago, I wrote two posts on my blog previewing and reviewing 'Pop Rocks', an ABC Family Channel made-for-TV movie starring Gary Cole (of Office Space & West Wing fame, most notably). Those posts ended up being the largest draw to my blog, even after ABC Fam had stopped airing the movie. The posts weren't actually all that informative and the review post was fairly brief, pretty much noting that the movie was on par with made-for-TV movies. Yet, for the most part, that was how people found my blog. Rather disconcerting, to be honest.
 
Don't feel down, I am sure there are many people who visit regularly. I know I do.
 
Here is what I've noticed.

When I got Slashdotted my average time spent on the site went in the basement. It seems that most /. readers just click a link and if you don't win them over with the 1st sentance its all over. They are more likely just to argue on /. than read your article.

On normal weeks my time per visitor is usually 2-3x and my page views goes up 2-3x also.

So I concluded I have regular visitors that like to sniff around.
 
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