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Traffic and Readership

Friday, 24 September 2004

There have been a bunch of encouraging inquiries regarding thenewsponsorship/advertising initiative, but everyone wants to knowabout readership numbers and traffic — which of course is perfectlyreasonable.

So, here’s the gist of the traffic this site generates, and how manyimpressions a sponsor can reasonably expect in a month.

According to my stats from Google AdSense, I averaged a little over6,000 impressions per day for the last two months. This number has beenslowly inching higher over the course of the last year. Traffic isgenerally lower on weekends (especially Sundays) and higher on weekdays.

I think Google’s estimate here is very accurate, and comes very closeto the number I come up with analyzing my server logs. (No less thanTim Bray agrees regardingthe accuracy of Google’s “impressions” count.) However, this only takes into account my home page and myindividual article archives — which were the only pages where Idisplayed Google’s ads.

Myprojects section — for Markdown, SmartyPants, etc. — averagedbetween 700 to 800 page views per day for the months of August andSeptember to-date. Unlike the Google ads, my sponsorship ads are runningon these pages too. (They’re running on almost every page of the site infact.)

So my honest estimate is that my sponsorship ads will average around7,000 total impressions per day. Assuming I sell out all five slots,each 4-week sponsor should receive about 39,000 impressions:

((7000 pages/day) * (28 days)) / 5 ad slots = 39,200 total impressions

In terms of CPM, that works out to $500/39K, which is roughly $12.75CPM. For a weekly $200 sponsorship, it’s roughly a nice even $20 CPM.When there are fewer than five active sponsors, those CPM rates comedown.

To be clear, the appeal of Daring Fireball as an advertising forum isnot the raw page view counts — there are scads of sites, including manyweblogs, with significantly more traffic. Daring Fireball’s format —longer articles posted around twice a week — generates many fewer pageviews than a weblog consisting of multiple blurbs posted several timesper day. There are other factors to consider as well, such as the factthat I don’t offer comments — a feature that encourages regular readersto reload pages several times per day.

Readership

How many pages I serve I can reasonably estimate. How manyreadersthat translates into — well, that involves some guesswork.Extrapolating web server logs into readership numbers is right up therewithpolitical election polling in terms of exemplifying the old“lies, damned lies, and statistics” aphorism. [Update: I hadoriginally attributed this quote to Mark Twain, but in factit’s fromBenjamin Disraeli, whom Twain in turn quoted in his ownautobiography. Thanks toPaul Beard for the correction.]

In a typical 48-hour period after I publish a new article, I serve pagesto around 10,000 unique IP addresses: roughly 6,000 for my home page,and 4,000 for individual articles in my archive. This is far from anexact count of uniquereaders. Some readers access the site frommultiple locations (work and home, for example); in other cases,multiple readers are hidden behind a single IP address. But I think it’sa fair, conservative estimate of Daring Fireball’s regular, loyalreadership. If anything, I honestly suspect the true number is higherthan 10,000 — if for no reason other than that many readers might onlycheck the site once a week or so.

Another way to look at it is to count unique IP addresses accessing mypublic RSS feed. In the same 48-hour period after I publish a newarticle, I average a hair over 10,000 unique IP addresses accessing my/index.xml resource. That doesn’t count the 1,272 subscribers readingmy feed viaBloglines — a deservedly popular web-basedaggregator that only accesses my feed once and shares the data withevery Bloglines user who is subscribed to my feed.

Unique IP addresses are easy to count, but again, there are all sorts ofreasons I can’t state with certainty how manypeople are subscribed tomy feed. Some people might subscribe both from multiple locations (e.g.Bloglines at work, NetNewsWire at home). And because Daring Fireball isin the default subscription list for popular Mac aggregators such asNetNewsWire and PulpFiction, there are surelysome subscribers to myfeed who aren’t actually regular readers of the site — they simplynever bothered to unsubscribe.

Relative Popularity

The most interesting metric would be how popular Daring Fireball isrelative to other web sites. But if estimating readership is guesswork,estimating relative popularity compared to other sites — without accessto verifiably-accurate copies of other sites’ server logs — is well-nighimpossible.

But let’s take a stab at it anyway.

Bloglines maintains a list of “most popular blogs”, ranked inorder of how many Bloglines users are subscribed to each feed. BecauseBloglines is web-based and thus cross-platform, I suspect their rankingsare pretty accurate. At this writing, Daring Fireball is ranked 99th.That’s based solely on Bloglines users subscribed to my main/index.xml RSS feed. If you added the 140+ Bloglines users whoare subscribed to mymembers-only feeds, the ranking would jumpanother 10 spots or so.

Now that’s certainly not to claim that Daring Fireball is one of the 100most popular web sites in the world. I mean, come on. But it strikes meas a fairly accurate gist of where Daring Fireball stands in relationto other weblogs — and perhaps more importantly, how popular DaringFireball is amongst the sort of people who know what a “syndicated XMLfeed” is.

If humility didn’t stand in the way, I might point out that very few ofthe sites in Bloglines’ rankings listed ahead of Daring Fireball wouldbe appropriate venues for advertisers targeting Daring Fireball’ssavvy Mac-enthusiast audience.

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