Traffic Reports

I managed to skip doing a traffic report last month amidst all the excitement. August and September were both pretty busy around here, with 56,000 hits in August and over 79,000 in September, which is a new alltime high around here. The traffic increase seems to have coincided with the hurricanes. I guess a lot of people were looking everywhere they could for information about Katrina and Rita.

Unfortunately, these past few months have also seen a spike in spam referrals. It’s getting so bad that a lot of bloggers are complaining about it. My webhost blogged about it recently, and Dwight wrote about a huge growth in spamblogs, which seems to be the driver of this annoying trend. He’s got more info here; all I can say is that I hope the folks at Google are smart enough to keep up with these guys.

Anyway, the usual list of referrers and search terms is below the fold. Sadly, the referrers lists are shorter than usual due to all the crap sites crowding the real ones out. Sorry about that. Thanks as always for visiting!

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July had a slight downtick to 49,000 visitors (August has already exceeded this). I continue to think that’s just randomness, mostly due to fluctuations in search engine referrals. The holiday week is also a slow time.

July featured the appearance of some guest bloggers for the first time in this space. I think they did a great job – they certainly let me relax during my time away, knowing that the place was in good hands. Having decided that a little time off now and again is beneficial, I figure I’ll do something like that once a year or so.

July also featured the unfortunate reappearance of referral log spam, which is still the stupidest use of spammer resources that I can imagine. I guess it’s marginally less annoying than comment or trackback spam, but still.

Top referrers and search engine terms are beneath the fold. As always, thanks very much for coming by.

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June was a slightly slower month, with about 50,000 total hits. I’m never sure what causes the monthly variations in traffic, though for the most part I suspect it’s search engine referrals. I thought June would herald some summer doldrums, but the Special Session parade put an end to that line of thinking. The usual list of top referrers and search engine queries is beneath the More link. As always, thanks for stopping by.

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May was my busiest month of the year so far, with about 57,000 hits. Links from Atrios and Crooked Timber helped boost the numbers a bit, but things were pretty steady overall.

Every once in awhile, I look at the referral log numbers that my webhost generates and I see something that I hadn’t noticed in the Sitemeter referrals. Sometime in May I got over 200 referrals from this discussion thread on Poe News. The thread is called “ACLU Wants Cross Removed From Cemetery”, which seemed odd to me at first when I clicked on it to check it out, since I had no idea what they were talking about. Then it hit me – the original poster had linked to this picture I took in France, which he presumably found via a Google image search. It doesn’t have anything to do with whatever he would have been writing about, but it is a nice photo if I do say so myself. Here’s the post that goes with the photo, in case you’re curious.

Anyway. Thank you as always for visiting. Top referrers and search terms are beneath the fold.

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The hit count was about 52,000 for the month of April, with fairly steady daily totals throughout. I can’t actually remember anything exciting from a traffic-watching point of view for the month, so I’ll take this opportunity to say thank you as always for reading. I really appreciate it.

Top referrers and search terms are beneath the More link.

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I had nearly 55,000 hits in March, putting it just a notch below January’s total. The scourge of referral log spam continues, but I suppose I’m getting a little amount of perverse satisfaction in knowing that the clowns who are clogging up my logs are getting absolutely no hits from it as a result.

It’s practically meaningless to track this sort of thing, since I had to change Sitemeter accounts last year, but at the rate I’m going, sometime in May I should get my one millionth hit. Like masterpoints for bridge players, beyond a certain point it’s all just noise and ego, but I figure that next order of magnitude is a long ways off, so I may as well at least note this in passing.

Top referrers and search terms are beneath the fold. As always, thank you all very much for visiting.

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Had about 47,000 hits in February. The unfortunate trend of spam referrals continues. Hard to say how much effect that has on my traffic numbers – I’m not even sure I want to know. Whatever effect it does have, I’m still grateful to all of you for coming by. Thanks very much, and click the More link for the usual list of top referrers and search engine terms.

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I bounced back in a big way in January with a smidgeon over 55,000 hits, thanks in large part to a gazillion search engine referrals for Ashley McElhiney. At a guess, I’d say I’d have had a more modest 45,000 hits or so without that. Why she was such a popular search engine request I can’t say, but it drove me some traffic, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately, a lot of my top referrers for the month were spam sites, something which is continuing in February and which is crowding out some real referrers. I have no idea why any spammer would think this is a good thing for them to do, since the only place these URLs show up is on pages that require a login, but they’re there and they’re really annoying. I even got a bunch of spam referrals that appear to be spoofing a legitimate blog. Go figure on that one. At some point, I may try to implement this solution for referral spam, but it’s low on my to-do list right now.

Be that as it may, I am as always glad you, the actual readers, stopped by. That’s what matters, and it’s why I do these posts every month. Thank you all very much. Top (real) referrers and search terms are beneath the More link.

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Not too surprisingly, I saw a big dropoff in traffic from November to December. About 41,000 visitors came by last month, making it the second slowest month of the year, and that was after a late referral from Atrios. Everything is relative, of course – last year at this time I had 35,000 hits and it was my best month ever up till then.

Counting it all up for the year, I got about 535,000 hits, which is pretty amazing to me. As always, I thank you all very much for coming by. I feel very rewarded knowing that you do.

Top referrers are beneath the More link. Sadly, this month I seem to be deluged with spam domains in the referral stats that I get from my webhost. They don’t show up as Sitemeter referrals, which makes me wonder if they’re comment or trackback spams that got blocked by MT Blacklist but still counted as referrals by my host. I don’t know, but I do know that at the rate some of these are showing up, they may crowd out real referrers from the monthly total (I only see the top numbers). We’ll see what happens.

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Even with the lull of the Thanksgiving holiday, November was my busiest month ever, with over 63,000 hits. I had a similar buildup, though with much smaller numbers, around the 2002 elections. I do expect things to drop off – December numbers are already slower, and we’re nowhere near Christmas yet. But that’s OK. I feel I’ve got a great audience here, and as always, I really appreciate your readership. I know of at least one colleague who’s shutting things down post-election, but there will be none of that here. Too much to talk about, and it’s still fun to do.

Top referrers and search terms beneath the More link.

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October was my busiest month ever, with about 58,000 visits. Obviously, the election drove a lot of that. Things have slacked off a bit in November, but not all that much so far. We’ll see what happens. I expect to be a little less political in the coming months, but not too much. Not with the 79th Lege about to convene, and with local elections next November (though they rate to be a lot less exciting than last year’s), and with what should be rampant speculation and jockeying for the 2006 statewides. But I’m in as much need of a little change of pace as the next person, so expect to see some more variety around here for awhile.

As always, thanks very much for visiting. Top referrers and search terms are beneath the More link.

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September was a busy month here, with about 49,000 hits, nosing it past June for the second busiest month. October looks to be even better, thanks in large part to the election, which appears to be driving everyone’s traffic up. Thanks to everyone for stopping by. Top referrers are beneath the More link.

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September’s almost over, isn’t it? That means I really ought to do the August traffic report, so I don’t fall any farther behind. We had about 45,000 hits in August, a nice rebound from the doldrums of July but still behind the heights of May and June. A link from Kevin Drum is always a big traffic driver, and I got one of those last month.

As for my overall totals, as I’m on my second blog location and third Sitemeter counter, it’s not really possible to say for sure. I’m over 600,000, but that’s about as exact as it gets. Needless to say, whatever the number is I’m very happy with it, and I thank you all for coming by.

Top referrers and search engine terms are beneath the More link.

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Had about 37,000 hits in July, which is a dropoff from June and May but not bad considering I had no flood-of-traffic links. This is probably my natural level for now. I’ll be curious to see if the publicity surrounding the Blogging of the DNC will increase those bloggers’ traffic, and if there will be a trickle down effect from there. Anyway, thanks as always to everyone for reading. Top referrers and search engine terms are beneath the More link.

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Just shy of 50,000 visits in June, making it a bit slower than May but still second-best all time. Nothing like a couple of links from Kevin Drum to send the hit counter spinning, that’s for sure. July is shaping up to be slower, back to April levels, but that’s OK.

So far, I’ve managed to keep about the same level of blogging nearly six weeks after Olivia came along (new picture, btw). She thankfully seems to have inherited her daddy’s above-averge sense of mellowness, which helps. I’m sure all bets will be off when she starts teething, but hey, who am I to borrow trouble? Life is good and I’m enjoying it.

Anyway, thanks as always for dropping by and making this a fun place to be. Top referrers are beneath the More link.

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May was by far my busiest month ever, with about 56,000 visitors. I have Comptroller Strayhorn and the Unitarian Universalist Church to thank for that, as both my original post and my followup on the reversal were linked all over creation, with Atrios as usual providing the bulk of the referrals (over 15,000 of them, which just boggles my mind).

After a couple of big weeks like that, I’m never sure if my traffic will slide back to previous levels or step up to a new plateau. Whatever does happen, I’m grateful as always to you for dropping by. June is my 30th month of blogging, and having the great readership that I do keeps it fresh and fun for me. Thanks very much, and click on the More link for the top referrers.

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April was my best month ever, with about 41,000 hits. A couple of referrals from Kevin Drum’s new Political Animal site was a big part of the boost. Things have tapered off a bit so far in May, but my weekly running average continues to remain at or above 1200, which is as high as it’s ever been on a regular basis. As always, thanks to everyone for reading and for returning. Top referrers are beneath the More link.

Though this will be a very busy summer, with the state Democratic convention, who knows how many special sessions, Texas Tuesdays, and of course that big election in November, I expect things to slow down for awhile here soon, as my posting schedule will be greatly curtailed after the baby arrives. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to figure things out, so please bear with me. We’re still 2-3 weeks away from the due date, but with babies you never know for sure.

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There were about 33,000 hits here in March, a number that might have been a bit higher had it not been for some outages, including a major DDOS attack, on my webhost. Traffic fluctuates somewhat from week to week, with search engine referrals varying over time, but in general a normal weekday is in the 1100-1400 range while a normal weekend day is in the 600-800 range. As always, thanks to everyone for dropping by and for coming back.

I don’t normally add much content to these posts, but since Big Media Matt and Angry Bear are discussing the topic of blog traffic and new blogs breaking in, I’ll throw in a few thoughts. I’ve been around for almost exactly as long as Yglesias, and there’s no question in my mind that it’s harder to get noticed now. The ratio of Blogs I Ought To Read to Blogs I Actually Have Time To Read grows continuously, as I’m sure it has for everyone. A lot of new blogs only get noticed if a top-level blogger hypes them. In January of 2002, there just wasn’t all that much competition, especially on the liberal side of the house, and all you had to do to get blogrolled somewhere was to blogroll someone else.

Yglesias says:

Nowadays, though, it seems like it’ll be very hard to break into the top ranks unless, like [Wonkette], you can take advantage of pre-existing relationships with people who are important in the sphere.

[…]

A mitigating factor is the increasing trend toward group blogs so that someone running a worthy, but under-read, site may become incorporated into a more established enterprise.

The list of 2003 Koufax Award Finalists for Best New Blog bear this out: it’s almost all group blogs and pro blogs. Two non-pro blogs are Kos alumni (Steve Gilliard and Whiskey Bar), and the group blog Corrente is made up of former guest posters at Eschaton. That’s a tough crowd to go up against.

But it’s not impossible, and there are many ways to make a splash. I’ve long felt that finding a niche is key to success for most people, which is one reason why I try to keep the main focus of this blog on Texas stuff rather than national or international issues. It’s not a ticket to Atrios/Kos numbers, but there’s clearly a lot of interest in The Great State of Texas. Blogs with at least some focus on places that aren’t that well-represented (New York, California, and DC) are usually worthwhile to me. Similarly, there’s lots of law and economics blogging out there, but not a whole lot about health care, education, insurance, and so on. Find a niche and fill it, and people will find you.

Anyway, that’s how I see it. Back to my original topic, top referrers and search terms are under the More link.

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I don’t really know how much traffic I had in February thanks to the sudden and inexplicable death of my Sitemeter counter early on in the month. After a couple days of ruling out every other possibility, I decided it had to be specific to that one account. I bit the bullet and switched everything over to the counter that I had (and thankfully still remembered the logon/password details for) on my old Blogspot site. I know I got about 21,000 hits since that was configured on Feb 11, so let’s say I got 32,000 hits. I got a lot of referrals from my post about Howard Stern getting dropped by Clear Channel while they were picking up Michael Savage, which helped drive that total.

By the way, I never did get an answer from the Sitemeter folks about my account. You do get what you pay for.

Top referrers are below the More link. As always, thanks for reading.

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I’ve gone and reclaimed the old Sitemeter counter I’d used on my Blogspot site. Had to reset it to zero and rebuild all my pages, and I’ll be taking a WAG as to my actual February numbers, and so on and etcetera. What can I say, I got what I paid for. Ultimately, I’ll probably add an Extreme Tracking and/or Add Free Stats counter just to compare and contrast, but for now I’m too lazy. (Thanks to Alan for the Add Free Stats suggestion.)

I had about 32,000 visits in January, making it slightly less busy than December but pretty decent overall. Jon Matthews and American Idol tryouts continue to be big search enine favorites – these two posts on Matthews have drawn a boatload of comments, mostly asking for updates, and I eventually closed comments on the American Idol post. Lea Fastow was popular last month, but the second most frequent search term and a consistent winner for some time now is “ugly people”, presumably because of my Show Business for Ugly People category. Who knew there was such interest?

Top referrers are below the More link. As always, thank you for coming by. I hope I can make a decent guess at February’s numbers.

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December was my busiest month ever, with over 35,000 hits on the Sitemeter counter, thanks to several high-profile links to my Worst Movies list and my interview with Richard Morrison. Had there not been the usual lull for Christmas and New Year’s, I would’ve easily topped 40,000. I seem to get about 1000 hits per day now, though admittedly a lot of that is search engine results. Still, I’m happy with the site’s growth, and I look forward to another year of it. As always, I thank everyone for reading. Good feedback really makes a difference, and I appreciate all of the good feedback that I get.

Top referrers are below the More link.

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There were about 26,000 visitors in November, so it had about the same daily pace as October. As with October, it would have been more had it not been for a Real World event, in this case Thanksgiving. A link from The Register in an article about the Atrios/Luskin lawsuit-that-wasn’t, and a zillion Google searches for information about local radio talk-show host Jon Matthews, who has been indicted for indecency with a minor, were the main engines of new traffic.

I got my 200,000th Sitemeter hit for this site on November 30, but a bigger milestone is drawing near: my two-year blog anniversary will be January 1. As always, thanks to everyone for reading and for returning. Top referrers are beneath the More link.

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October was a slower month than September, thanks in part to the end of the redistricting battle and the week off that I took to go to France. Still, some 27,000 hits were recorded, making it my second busiest month ever. I also had my 150,000th Sitemeter visit early on – number 200,000 should be stopping by this week.

Top referrers and search engine terms are under the More link. As always, thank you for reading.

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Better get to this before October ends – September continued a trend of Best Months Ever, a trend that will be broken this month thanks both to a perfect storm of events that pushed me to new heights and my travel schedule. Some 33,000 visitors stopped by last month, drawn here by the soon-to-be-resolved redistricting saga, the What Texas Democrats Should Do Next blogburst, and National Talk Like A Pirate Day, which attracted gobs of search engine requests. As always, thanks to everyone for reading and for returning. I really appreciate it.

Top referrers and search terms are under the More link.

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I’m just back from an out-of-town trip and still feeling a bit mellow, so regular blogging will resume tomorrow. Meantime, I had about 27,000 hits in August, making it by far my best month yet. Having a full month of search engine hits among my Sitemeter-counted stats was a big part of that, but some big referrals from Atrios, Calpundit, Kos and Tom Spencer also helped.

I received the 100,000th Sitemeter hit for this site in August, which thanks to the search engine referrals was well ahead of projections. Filtering all that out, it feels like I have about 400-500 daily human visitors, which just amazes me. Thank you all very much for coming by and especially for coming back.

High referrers are beneath the More link for those who might be interested.

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July was by far my best month for visits, with nearly 19,000 Sitemeter hits. That’s more than double my next best month. There were two factors for this. One was that search engine referrals are now being counted by Sitemeter. I’d guess that amounts to about 7000-8000 hits, which means that this still would have been easily my best month ever. The reason for that, of course, was the ongoing redistricting mess. As in the month of May, our legislative circus has helped bring many people here.

On that note, I’d like to thank the many bloggers who have cited my coverage of this continuing saga, in no particular order: Taegen Goddard, Atrios, Byron LaMasters, Calpundit, Rob Booth, Sisyphus Shrugged, Save Texas Reps, Ruminate This, Greg Wythe, Angry Bear, Ginger Stampley, Pacific Views, Linkmeister, Kevin Whited, UggaBugga, Scott Chaffin, Steve Smith, Daily Kos, Puri sermonis amator, JBHolston, Apostropher, Swanky Conservative, Henry Lewis, Greg Greene, Morat, PG, Norbizness, Thomas Nephew, and Jeff Cooper. I’ve probably forgotten someone, and if it’s you please accept my apologies for the oversight. (Update: And the winner of the I-knew-I’d-forget-someone sweepstakes is Tom Spencer. Sorry, Tom!)

As usual, top referrers can be found under the More link. As always, thanks to everyone for reading and for returning. I do appreciate it.

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One of the effects of adding Sitemeter code to my archive pages was to move up by about a month the date on which my 100,000th Sitemeter hit would arrive. Counting the roughly 18,500 hits I got on my old Blogspot blog, that hit came this morning at 7:52 on a referral from Calpundit. That seems fitting, as it was a couple of links from Kevin that helped spike my traffic even more this month. With two different counters, two different blog locations, and a long stretch of not seeing search engine requests in my Sitemeter stats, this is of course a totally arbitrary event. But then so is most of blogging, so what the heck.

Thanks as always to everyone for reading and for coming back for more. Now on to seven digits! Just don’t ask me to estimate a date for it.

So yesterday, when I pointed to the new Blog Traffic Ranking at TTLB, I noted that I hardly got any Sitemeter referrals from search engines, even though I got tons of them on my old Blogspot blog. This led Prof. Cooper to point out to me that I didn’t have the Sitemeter code on any of my archive pages. I went ahead and added it, and boom! Tons of search engine referrals, which combined to add 150-200 hits to stats yesterday. (And yes, to answer my own question, that appears to be new Sitemeter-counted traffic, not merely the conversion of “unknown” referrals to something identifiable.) Combine that with a recent spike that saw my numbers climb above 400 before any Google traffic was counted, plus the seven-day-average nature of Sitemeter, and the end result is that I’m #99 on Bear’s list. Woo hoo!

I had no idea that putting the Sitemeter code on my archive pages would have that big an effect. My old Blogspot blog gets maybe 20 search engine hits a day, but of course this blog has nearly a year’s more stuff, and it’s updated daily. In a way, I miss my fairly clean-looking Sitemeter reports. I know that the boost I just gave myself is artificial – let’s face it, maybe one Google searcher out of 100 stays long enough to look at anything beyond what they’ve found – but if everyone else is doing it, I ought to be allowed the same basis for comparison. Besides, now that I’ve rebuilt all of my archives I’m not going to go back and remove the code, but I am glad to know approximately what percentage of my traffic is real people.

This also explains why the counter that you see, which is based on CGI code provided by my web host, is about 8000 hits higher than what Sitemeter says. A little bit of that is due to the brief lag time between when I set this page up and when I officially announced it on my Blogspot site, but most of it, I now assume, is search engine referrals. Nice to finally realize that.

Via Atrios, I see that TTLB has a new feature, which is a ranking of blog traffic based on Sitemeter statistics. There are numerous caveats that come with this – not everyone uses Sitemeter, not everyone makes their stats public (both of which Bear mentions), and Sitemeter’s “average per day” number refers only to the last seven days – but given that there is no single accepted standard for monitoring traffic, I’d say Bear’s done a nice job.

I’ve always had a password on my Sitemeter stats, for reasons that I no longer recall. Given that, and given that I’d have just missed Bear’s top 100 with my current numbers, I’ve reset the security level on my stats back to Normal, meaning that they’re visible if you care to look.

Here’s a hypothesis: People who do much better in the traffic rankings than they do in the Ecosystem have a lot of non-blogger readers who bookmark their site, while those who do much better in the Ecosystem than in the traffic rankings have expended a lot of energy getting other bloggers to link to them. Getting other people to blogroll you is certainly a way to build traffic to your site, but some links are worth more than others. It’s not necessarily the highest-traffic sites that send the most traffic your way, either – I find that on the average, I get the most regular traffic from blogs I read every day. Of course, the initial listing is affected by the sites that don’t have public Sitemeter stats or otherwise got missed this time. As was the case with the resurrected Ecosystem, we shouldn’t draw any broad conclusions until we’re sure all of the data is in hand.

So, am I overly obsessed with this sort of thing, or is this normal blogger behavior?

UPDATE: Whoa! In the comments, I noted that I see almost no search engine referrals in my Sitemeter stats, though I see plenty of them in the report that my web host provides. Jeff Cooper solved the mystery for me – Sitemeter only shows referrals for pages that have their code on it, and my archive page didn’t have it. I went and added it in, and boom! Many Google and other search engine referrals. Now for the next question: I presume that these used to be “unknown”, rather than being totally new referrals. Is that true?

I had about 7600 visitors in June, making it my second-best month ever. In the end, the pace was just slightly behind that of May, when I broke 8000 hits; going out of town for a few days dropped the rate just enough to lag behind. I made my 2000th post late in the month, after receiving my 2000th comment early on. Visitors 80,000 and 85,000 arrived in June, keeping me on track to hit 100,000 in late August. There are a number of new blogs in the list of top referrers for the month – as always, the complete list is under the More link.

As of July 1, I’ve been in the blogging business for a year and a half. On July 20, I’ll celebrate one full year on this domain. My monthly traffic has roughly doubled since I abandoned Blogspot, as you can see here (the July 2002 total is skewed by my arrival late in the month; it was about what I got in August if you add visits from my old site). I’m still going strong after 18 months, thanks in large part to my great readers. I can’t tell you how fantastic it is to hear or read the words “I enjoy your blog”. Thank you, all of you, very much.

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May was my busiest month ever by a lot, with about 8100 visits, according to Sitemeter. That’s over 1500 hits more than my previous high water mark. Without a doubt, the story of the Killer D’s drove much of that traffic. Links from usual suspects like Atrios and Daily Kos, links from new places like Political Wire, The Burnt Orange Report, and a Salon Table Talk thread, and folks who came here having read my coverage at the Political State Report were among the big contributors. There appears to have been a residual effect as well – my normal weekday traffic has topped 300 per day, about a 20% increase. I had my 75,000th visitor during May, and at the rate I’m going will get 80,000 in about a week and 100,000 in August. I’m pleased and humbled by this, and I’m very grateful to everyone for reading.

A full list of top referrers is underneath the More link. Thanks again for stopping by.

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April started out like gangbusters and may have been my busiest month ever had I not taken a week off to visit California. Not that I’m complaining, mind you – we had a fantastic time out west. I still wound up with about 6200 visitors, according to Sitemeter. Late in the month I had my 70,000th visitor, and should hit 75,000 sometime before the Memorial Day weekend. On a slightly different note, late in April the total number of comments on this site passed the number of posts.

As always, thanks to everyone for stopping by, and especially for coming back. Top referrers for last month are listed under the More link.

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March was my second-best month for traffic, beating out last December by a nose at just over 6500 visitors. It actually started out slowly, then got a strong boost when Sean-Paul blogrolled me.

The visible counter on the lower right rolled past 50,000 right after April began. That counter was installed immediately when this site came online, when my old blog was still active. At this rate, I expect to have had about 70,000 visitors in my first full year on this site.

As always, thanks to everyone for visiting and for coming back. The top referrers and search engine queries for March are beneath the More link.

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February was a slower month than the previous two, but it still wound up as my fourth-best ever, with slightly over 5500 visits.

February 8 marked one year since I installed a hit counter. I recorded about 54,000 visits in that year, and will pass 60,000 sometime in the second week of March.

Top referrers and search terms are under the More link for those who may be interested.

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