“Blog king” no more

Written By: - Date published: 9:38 am, December 2nd, 2011 - 80 comments
Categories: admin, blogs, dpf, making shit up, The Standard - Tags:

Well we have just moved out of the election month, and we’re now getting the gradual fall back of readership and posts heading to xmas. About the only growth around NZ at present is in political blogging.

I’m happy to say that we now appear to consistently be either level pegging with Kiwiblog or exceeding their totals for a number of months. Since we have been ‘advised’ many times that this would never happen, I’m finding that it is rather more satisfying than I expected.

The title of this post comes from a article in the Sunday Star Times early last month that gave an overview of the local blogosphere where it stated

There have been various attempts to rank the local blogs, although nothing definitive has been produced.

But what is not in dispute is the reign of Wellingtonian David Farrar as the nation’s blog king. His Kiwiblog site routinely tops the lists with something like 50,000 visits a week.

That is complete bullshit. There is long running ranking system. We’ve been trouncing Kiwiblog on everything from comments to page views for quite some time. But I guess Tony Fitzsimons doesn’t read around the blogs a lot or that he believes self-serving PR when it is dished up to him.

Open Parachute has been running a nice simple list using public information for quite a while. We finally went on it in May after I put in the required plugins and tested them. If you have a look at the Open Parachute numbers for November and earlier months (June to November1) collected from public StatCounter and SiteMeter data this is what you see for the consistent top two blogs2, on Open Parachutes blog rankings are Kiwiblog and The Standard. The Standard has been getting very similar or larger page views for quite some time.

Month Page views Visitors Pages per visit
The Standard Kiwiblog The Standard Kiwiblog The Standard Kiwiblog
June 338,868 338,316 149,365 249,166 2.27 1.36
July 313,987 311,878 142,388 223,132 2.21 1.40
August 331,035 350,971 148,413 253,945 2.23 1.38
September 311,382 342,643 140,948 249,600 2.21 1.37
October 412,418 341,158 180,538 251,558 2.28 1.36
November 525,733 478,741 227,718 363,651 2.31 1.32

Now there are higher ‘visitors’ for Kiwiblog than for ourselves. But as Sitemeter states:-

Page Views are usually the safest item tracked that you can compare between different tracking systems. When you are browsing a site, every time you follow a link, it is treated as a single “page view”.

The main differences in the visitors appears to be from the different definitions of what is a ‘visit’.

The definition of a visit (or visitor) on one system, may not necessarily be the same thing as on another system. Site Meter’s definition is “a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views”. 30 minutes is the “session” length timeout. The “session” length timeout is the amount of time that Site Meter waits for another page view from a visitors before it assumes they’ve left the site. Other systems may have a longer or shorter session periods.

I’d say so. We run Statcounter, Google Analytics, something for Neilson, Wassup, WordPress Stats and Awstats. When you look at visits using what look like the same criteria in October4  we have had between 130k visits to 220k visits depending on the package.  When I was testing Sitemeter and Statcounter side by side in April with the same intervals I was getting significiant differences with Sitemeter being a bit higher during the week of testing.

Open Parachute picks up Statcounter from us.  It is set to use an idle time of 6 hours on a cookie. Kiwiblog uses SiteMeter which is set to 30 minutes. Different packages. Different visitor numbers. Plus of course we have a different layout which influences it as well.

But page views are far more consistent. The total of the page views on the front page, post, and pages are usually within 5k on our site between the different stats packages over the period of a month. That is well within the margins of error for what is recognized as being a human read of a page

Because of the  vagaries of dead Roman Emporers (damn you Julius Caesar) there are different days in different months so a clearer comparision is on a average daily basis.

Month Days Weekends Pages per day Visits per day
The Standard Kiwiblog The Standard Kiwiblog
June 30 5 11,296 11,277 4,979 8,306
July 31 5 10,129 10,061 4,593 7,198
August 31 4 10,679 11,322 4,788 8,192
September 30 4 10,379 11,421 4,698 8,320
October 31 5 13,304 11,005 5,824 8,115
November 30 4 17,524 15,958 7,591 12,122

 

What was interesting was a post David Farrar made last week looking at his stats for election week to Saturday.

From Google Analytics.

  • 38,110 unique visitors
  • 105,531 visits – of which 10,000 are to the mobile version
  • 213,626 page views

That means that nearly half of his page views for the month came in one week. Talk about people suddenly waking up to an election being on. But more on that in a later post.

I’ll have a look at other site measurements in later posts. But it is nice to be pushing ahead of Kiwiblog. I’m sure that the authors will be chuffed.

 

1. May was a problem for our stats. We had a spike when  Facebook had a problem with their new async ‘like’ system and they started pounding our site for page views. It took a while to find a counter in .htaccess as they kept moving it. Eventually they fixed the problem. May was also the first month that we were on Open Parachute.

2. Open Parachute isn’t complete by any stretch of the imagination. There are a number of sites that don’t have public stats, where the stats are not public,  or where people haven’t told Ken where to read the stats. There are a couple of sites that sometimes pop up to the top of his stats for a month. However they are sites that largely have a readership that appears to largely be outside New Zealand.

3. Note that these are not ‘hits’ as you’d get off a logs package like AwStats and they exclude pages requested from all identified spambots and spiders.

4. When I was looking at this post, I picked up some of the stats before the end of the month. That is why these figures are for October

80 comments on ““Blog king” no more ”

  • Comments are now closed

  1. the sprout 1
    2 December 2011 at 9:50 am

    good job well done

  2. freedom 2
    2 December 2011 at 10:13 am

    Barkeep ! we have some thirsty authors and some hard working moderators to thank. We need celebratory cold ones at that table over there, the one David Farrar is weeping behind.

  3. alwyn 3
    2 December 2011 at 10:13 am

    Tumeke also publishes Blog ratings. The ones they have displayed at the moment give Kiwiblog, as always, at number one. They then have Whaleoil up two places in second and The Standard down a place in third.
    Could it be that you are selecting a method that works for you? I know the scorn expressed in this blog about the various polls during the election that showed results that weren’t in line with what you wanted to see.
    Incidentally do you have any information where Red Alert rated? They got so trigger happy during the campaign it was like Trump’s apprentice program, with the words “Permanently banned” replacing “You’re fired”. I like a number of my acquaintances simply stopped reading it as there was never any discussion.

    • the sprout 3.1
      2 December 2011 at 10:17 am

      if you look closely you’ll see the tumeke rating date’s from Christmas last year – hasn’t been updated since so i think they’ve moved out of blogratings.
      go to open parachute linked to in post for more ratings of other sites

    • lprent 3.2
      2 December 2011 at 10:35 am

      Not really, Tim’s method appeared to have been defined by a committee attempting to get a good result for some blogs. It also relied on people giving their results from a variety of sources. Other similar ones by scubone and others looked like they were contorted to get the ‘right’ result.

      Open Parachutes one is a simple pickup from the Sitemeter or Statcounter (or another one or two) public available data for sites. There is no calculations apart from those already in the stats packages.

      Page views is pretty unambiguous if it isn’t counting bots. Visits (as I have explained) is a bit more problematic. But if Tim was still using his technique today, bearing in mind the numbers of posts we use each day and the comments on them, I’m pretty sure that we’d either be at the top or hellishly close to it.

      But we pretty much work from our internal stats where we’re looking at what works (some get page views, some get facebook recomends, some get comments, some get links, some get a lot of different people reading it and a few get combinations of all of those and get pretty ballistic) and what doesn’t (there are still posts that simply don’t work), and all of the authors see those. Besides the comments from users on posts are pretty good feedback mechanisms in their own right.

      I also look a lot at how much work has to be expended in moderating compared to the numbers of people and comments – which I personally find quite a good measure

      As far as I’m aware Red Alert hasn’t put a Statcounter or Sitemeter in. They should. Suggest it to them (I have very limited time to read other sites these days)

      • Gosman 3.2.1
        2 December 2011 at 11:44 am

        Tim’s methods were a joke and I suspect made up. They included comments against articles as a measure but somehow the ones Tumeke’s suggested they averaged more per article than they probably got per month after they instituted they draconian moderation policy.

  4. ghostwhowalksnz 4
    2 December 2011 at 10:18 am

    Farragoblog used to give his monthly stats, but stopped a while back and occasionally gives ‘summaries’

    Then again hes done ‘nothing’ this election apart from his usual ‘ if I stand on a box and count the flies on the ceiling that could give Labour and its allies a majority’

    Then again hes spending more time linking to the Oily Orca, when they both know the post was researched in Nationals muck rackers back room -( Does anyone know its office location ?)

    • Gosman 4.1
      2 December 2011 at 11:50 am

      “Then again hes done ‘nothing’ this election apart from his usual ‘ if I stand on a box and count the flies on the ceiling that could give Labour and its allies a majority’”

      What???

      What would you expect him to do? He’s a blogger who blogs his opinion’s on a range of topics. As far as I can tell this is what he did during the election campaign with a little more emphasis on politics obviously.

      • Owesome 4.1.1
        4 December 2011 at 1:07 pm

        No, not really.

        I’m new to this whole ‘blogosphere’ thing and frankly I thought it would all be a little scary and intimidating.

        But then I read a few sites and it’s OK.

        But then there’s this Farrar guy who…

        1) Has a column in the Herald where he spins the poll results his way and basically talks up how important polls are
        2) Has his own ‘kiwiblog’ thing and it took me a while to realise that “DPF” and “David Farrar” are the same thing, and not some kind of “DPF is the company, Farrar is the man” thing (which I realise is a bit rich coming from me, but in my defence, I’m just a guy, while he…)
        3) Owns and runs a polling company, Curia, which does all of National’s internal polling, which he (presumably) gets a paycheck for, and
        4) It has been implied around Teh Internets that he’s tied in quite closely with the National Party Machine and gives them PR advice, and…
        5) Popped up in the TV1 election coverage.

        So he’s not “just a blogger.” He’s a contracted PR man and spin doctor.

        And that’s not even going in to the Cameron Slater thing. Prior to this I just thought he was the nutbar who released the names of the “TV Comedian Charged With Child Sex Offending.” Turns out he’s linked to the Act party through Cactus Kate, former ACT Party member/functionary, and once engaged Trevor Mallard in, in his words, “asymmetrical warfare” in order to distract him from running the Labour campaign.

        (Said warfare involved training for a bike race. Something which Mallard does anyway? Beats me. I wish I could make this up.)

        Me, I’m just some guy who wanted to de-construct the narrative of the election and got sidetracked making funny jokes about John Key being at the royal wedding instead of running the country.

        Those guys are more like freelance character assassins.

  5. fender 5
    2 December 2011 at 10:25 am

    I’ve only been hooked on the Standard for a few months and I’d say I’m going to be a life ‘member’. There is no better blog around as far as I can see, or find. As well as being the most intelligent site for political views I find the visitors who comment here also display a level of intelligence far above that of Kiwiblog or any other blog site. (I’m not patting myself on the back here as my input is small and mostly irrelevant in the scheme of things). Even some of the trolls who visit here seem higher calibre than trolls elsewhere, though some of them make my blood boil!
    I’ve learnt alot from this site and I’d like to congradulate The Standard for their great work.
    Keep it up, I’m loving your work and not really surprised you are number 1.

    • lprent 5.1
      2 December 2011 at 10:42 am

      Even some of the trolls who visit here seem higher calibre than trolls elsewhere, though some of them make my blood boil!

      A good troll is a comment streams best ally sometimes. I try to prune the dumb ones and leave in the ones who aren’t really trolls because they know how to say the words in different orders and will argue. But if you want dumb ones for a light refreshing dip in bile, just look for variations of my name and the sites in google.

      • King Kong 5.1.1
        2 December 2011 at 11:17 am

        Talking of dumb trolls. Am I still banned?

        [lprent: I thought you were until the election and those have been cleaned out – can’t see your e-mail or name. It you’re getting auto-moderated let me know and I’ll check the IP’s. ]

  6. pollywog 6
    2 December 2011 at 11:07 am

    A good troll is a comment streams best ally sometimes.

    Black with a Vengeance…though less a troll and more of a grey vampire or a psychodrama demon.

    he still ran tings proper at the Bog..

    NEK MINNIT !!!…banned 🙂

  7. Afewknowthetruth 7
    2 December 2011 at 11:13 am

    I looked at Kiwiblog a few times in the past and never found anything of interest there. It seems to be mostly opinionated rubbish which is completely disconnected from reality. And boring.

    The Standard does a pretty good job considering the affiliation and political leaning of most contributors.

    Nature Bats Last is by far the best blog I visit.

    http://guymcpherson.com/

    You’ll never see articles/essays promoting economic growth or so-called development there. It points out reality in hard-hitting terms, which tends to make the those who cannot face reality reteat very quickly.

    I find it is primarily visited by the like-minded 0.1% or so who ‘get it’, which means there are few pointless agruments with uninformed ‘idiots’ and a there is lot more genune discussion about where we are actually headed and what we should be doing to protect ourselves.

    Posting information connected with reality on TS is a kind of moral imperitive, though sometimes it becomes very tiring.

    • Gosman 7.1
      2 December 2011 at 12:07 pm

      ” It seems to be mostly opinionated rubbish which is completely disconnected from reality”

      Mr Pot let me introduce you to Mr Kettle. You might like to diiscuss respective colourings.

      “The Standard does a pretty good job considering the affiliation and political leaning of most contributors.”

      It obviously does quite well considering the traffic it gets. Just as Kiwiblog obviously does quite well considering the traffic it gets.

      I’d rate Kiwiblog as being more influential though as it gets mentioned in the wider space a lot more than anything that is written here.

      • Draco T Bastard 7.1.1
        2 December 2011 at 12:46 pm

        I’d rate Kiwiblog as being more influential though as it gets mentioned in the wider space a lot more than anything that is written here.

        At a guess I’d say that’s due to political bias. Our MSM sux.

        • insider 7.1.1.1
          2 December 2011 at 12:57 pm

          I think it is because it is clearly identified with a single person blogging under his own name who has built himself a reputation on and outside the blogosphere in a number of areas, including general internet issues.

          The Standard’s collective nature and mixed level of anonymity I think makes you less credible to the media. The tone of many posts doesn’t help either.

          • Draco T Bastard 7.1.1.1.1
            2 December 2011 at 1:42 pm

            Arguments should stand on their own – the persons name has nothing to do with it. you’d think that the MSM would be wise to this but, if we assume your logic, their authoritarian bias is obviously getting in the way.

            • insider 7.1.1.1.1.1
              2 December 2011 at 2:28 pm

              Arguements are fine but they are about opinion, and if it’s opinion then media tend to like to attribute them to real people not collectives. If it were all under Lynn’s name then the story might be slightly different. Alternatively if the Standard was generating ‘original’ stories through research such as OIAs, like NRT and Whaleoil, you might get some recognition. The bias is not against the left IMO it is against the collectivised anonymity.

              • Draco T Bastard …
                2 December 2011 at 2:45 pm

                …and if it’s opinion then media tend to like to attribute them to real people not collectives.

                If they’re being that pedantic they can associate it with the pseudonym.

                Alternatively if the Standard was generating ‘original’ stories through research such as OIAs…

                I’ve seen a few. Admittedly, not many since Marty G left.

                The bias is not against the left IMO it is against the left.

                FIFY, you may not have noticed but no one here is truly anonymous.

                As I said, their authoritarian bias is showing.

              • Carol …
                2 December 2011 at 6:20 pm

                Arguements are fine but they are about opinion, and if it’s opinion then media tend to like to attribute them to real people not collectives.

                Like NZ Herald editorials?

      • freedom 7.1.2
        2 December 2011 at 12:47 pm

        and why do you think that is gosman?

  8. Gosman 8
    2 December 2011 at 12:01 pm

    What I find interesting is that someone like lprent will defend the integrity of the authors on this blog (and justifiably so in my view) yet generally the mood here is to trash the integrity of fellow bloggers from the right especially David Farar. This is a bizarre double standard in my view.

    The thing is the Standard is comparing itself against a single blogger and you are all cock a hoop that you have pulled ahead in the popularity stakes. Congrats on that but really does it matter who is slightly more popular than the other and can’t you give the guy some credit for mixing it with half a dozen odd authors from the left and still having one of the most popular blogs in NZ?

    • Draco T Bastard 8.1
      2 December 2011 at 12:49 pm

      This is a bizarre double standard in my view.

      No it’s not. What you’ve just done is compare apples (lprent) with oranges (generally the mood here).

      BTW, pointing out when DPF is twisting the truth isn’t trashing his integrity – he’s doing that all by himself. It’s one of those personal responsibility things.

    • lprent 8.2
      2 December 2011 at 1:27 pm

      Ah. I guess you either weren’t around, ignored it, or just have a convenient memory.

      I guess that started when I got accused of lying in early 2008 by Farrar and Slater when I explained how we managed to be on some servers (after I moved it from one of mine) and that Labour didn’t pay for the site or my time or the time of authors to run and write on the site. I had frigging Bill English repeating the bullshit as well as it being spread through the media.

      That was followed by an attack by Slater on my old employers because one of my home systems was still acting as a secondary DNS for them and vice versa.

      Periodically the pseudonymous authors here get ‘outed’ by Slater which is invariably then repeated on Kiwiblog. So far not a single one of those “outings” has been substantiated and a couple of them have been refuted by the recipients. I usually advise all such recipients to just ignore such accusations unless they have to do something for work reasons.

      My favourite example of the absurd levels that got to was Slater saying definitively that r0b (who eventually outed himself as Anthony R0bins) was in fact Rob Salmond (the academic in the states who writes over at Pundit) because they shared a first name. Even after Rob Salmond stated that Slater/Farrar were wrong, all that statement received was more blustering without an apology.

      In other words outright lying from Slater, repeated and oft-times embellished by Farrar. I tend to call people as I see them, and these lying bozo’s have earned their lack of respect. These were not isolated mistakes. As far as I could see they are deliberate and constituted a planned attack on a rising left blog site and the people who write here for no other reason than it was a left site.

      I’m comfortable as treating them as demonstrably hostile because that is how they have proved themselves to be. I have no respect for them and my writing reflects that.

      It has been a much awaited milestone for the site because of the frequent “King of the blogs” and “largest blog site” statements by Farrar and his sycophants including the bloody boring trolls. They appear to consider it to be important and I do enjoy throwing it back in their teeth. I’d expect that most of the authors here feel the same.

      It took some time to get there because Kiwiblog did have a commanding lead. Kiwi blog started more than 4 years earlier than we did and grew their audience. If you think that running a multi-author blog is easier than a single person one, then I suspect you have a poor understanding of voluntary organisations

      • Gosman 8.2.1
        2 December 2011 at 4:15 pm

        Lynn, I generally respect the position you take in moderating this blog. At times it seems to be a little one sided to me but that is your right as one of the Blog owners. Given my experience of other blogs I think you guy’s a pretty tolerant of opposing viewpoints. Obviously you take the p#ss out of people you disagree with at times but that is not something that should be unexpected.

        I understand that you have very good reasons for disliking the linkage that was made between this site and the official Labour Party and you have been at pains to emphasis the independence of the opinions expressed in the articles here. I applaud this view and really have seen nothing that would cause me to doubt this view.

        That stated I have also seen opinions expressed here, some of these might even have been expressed by some of the authors of articles (I offer the provisio that I am not a hundred percent sure on this point), which suggest that other Blogs, (Kiwiblog for instance), were the result of deliberate media manipulation by the National party. When challenged for evidence for this the end result is always the same. This would be a reply along the lines of only a fool doesn’t know that David Farrar is being paid by the National party for spreading his misinformation.

        I have met David Farrar. He seems a nice enough guy. His blog is pretty innocuous to be honest. People might disagree with some of his commentators but I am sure you would agree that The Standard isn’t responsible for all the views expressed here. He has advised me that his views are his own and he is not directed to make them on his blog by any central body. I have no reason to disbelieve him.

        What I can’t understand is that you seem to allow the same sort of stuff to be stated about Kiwiblog that you yourself was upset about over when it was insinuated by Kiwiblog about The Standard. Why this double standard?

        • lprent 8.2.1.1
          2 December 2011 at 5:20 pm

          The most that I have ever said about him with regards to the National party was that he has been employed by National MP’s and he runs a polling company that seems to have one major customer – the National party. All of these are known.

          I’m suspicious of such an incestuous working relationship when people start talking about what is purported to be a Chinese wall between working and private. Especially since I saw him in the alt.politics.nz days in the mid-90’s writing e-mails supporting government positions that appeared during his working day. They look just like the lines he runs now. It could all just be coincidence and are just my opinions (which people can take notice of or not).

          I don’t hide the fact that I have volunteered to help the Labour party for years or that I am a programmer. However I haven’t been employed to do any political work and never have.

          What you appear to not grasp is that David Farrar has reproduced or stated incorrect ‘facts’ about me, the financing of this site, and other authors on the site that were outright fabrications and had no basis in fact. They were not done as comments. They were done as posts carefully framed to cause as much damage as possible. Which they partially achieved.

          However there are consequences to that set of actions. I am not a believer in turning the other cheek. I have found it much simpler to ensure that people do not wish to repeat attacks. So as a matter of policy, with right wing blogs especially kiwiblog and whaleoil, I run the principle that the very best defence is to mount a really effective offence as opportunities arise. It ensures that repeating such attacks against us will look a damn sight more costly than it appeared at first.

          The offence that I use is in exactly the same style that they used against this site. Framing memes like the sewer etc in posts. The difference is that I don’t need to lie about facts. All I do is state an opinion and a rationale and then get it adopted by others – many others. Other authors do the same. It is slow, simple, and extremely effective. It isn’t pretty, but it has markedly reduced the numbers of attacks in posts on this site since we started making headway with it.

          Comments are a different policy. The comments here, like there are relatively unconstrained. But we (like kiwiblog) ban people for comments that attack our site or authors. It causes too much of a problem with partisan flame wars. We are less concerned with what people say about other sites unless it drops over the edge into legal grey areas because it doesn’t affect our comments section to similar extents.

      • HHH 8.2.2
        3 December 2011 at 4:54 am

        Still don’t buy the “not funded by Labour” bullshit. And when we find out all your names we will name and most certainly shame you.

        • lprent 8.2.2.1
          3 December 2011 at 8:41 am

          Bullshit. I realize that the right loves solving problems with money and throwing people at things. I solve problems with intelligence and slicing the costs while enhancing the service. The left operates by working cooperatively (and running on little money).

          I used to pay all of the money for the site and with small donations up until we required $200 per month. Then we put in advertising (a lot of advertising) which more than pays for the site. We peaked on server costs when I switched to having a local and offshore server. Since then I have dropped the cost by a third while doubling capacity. I’m hopeful I can get back down under $300/month. That is all pure skill. Ben and rocky both have the skills to maintain that and even enhance it.

          The coop is is that we run a organization that has no meetings, has a thin email cooperation layer, and where most of the people barely know each other. You already know half of the active authors because they are public. I haven’t noticed Anthony Robins, Mike Smith, Ben Clark, rocky, Jenny Michie, or any of the others including myself being shamed. I also haven’t noticed any success by garbage divers like Slater managing to find out who any of the psuedonomyous authors are either.

          In fact I would say that your entire remark just demonstrates the ineffectual inadequacy of the right in dealing with the rise of this site. Wank on and keep dreaming – it is about all that you can do.

  9. lonelyavenger 9
    2 December 2011 at 12:12 pm

    The obvious reason The Standard would have more page views is you have to view an extra page to actually read an article. One can read complete posts on Kiwiblog just by viewing the main page.

    • lprent 9.1
      2 December 2011 at 2:08 pm

      Yep, there is some of that due to the structure of our site compared to kiwiblog. But it is not as simple as that.

      The number of front page looks are always less than a third of page views (the slow day average) and frequently less than a quarter. In other words the number of front page views is largely the same regardless of how many page views we have in total.

      The reason is because of the different ways people use the site.

      Usually well more than a half of the landings on the front page land on, and then leave from the front page without going to any other page. They do exactly what I do on kiwiblog. I scan the front page to see if there is anything of interest every few days. If by some miracle I see something interesting then I will drill into the page to read the post and comments – because the reactions are often of more interest than the post.

      Because front page there fills so fast it scrolls off to another page which is why we changed format here. You have to go to page two after a day or two. What we gained with the drill down, we lost from the weekly readers from walking back through pages. Right now you can see back to the 27th on our front page and only to the 30th on KB.

      Out ‘power users’ – ie many of the regular commentators and readers jump direct to posts from facebook or RSS feeds. Frequently they only read from the RSS feeds. I have seen large spikes in page reads when I have cut the RSS feed down to excerpts rather than the whole post. This is especially the case on the weekends when commentators get up to a third of the readers.

      Which I must think about again – the RSS feeds are not helping to pay for the servers. Leave RSS for excerpts and comments only should have the same effect for most people.

      And many users on the site cross jump between posts useing the nex/previous post links at the top and bottom of posts rather than navigating back out and in again. Others use the ‘Opinion’ or ‘Comments’ boxes to direct jump. I can see these in google analytics.

      In any case, the nett effect of these differences isn’t that much. When we did the change in early 2010, we saw a average medium term jump of a maximum of 10%. Some of that 10% was just extra readership from the new layout.

      Sorry, good theory. And I’d have supported it before we put the new layout in. Afterwards observations said that it was a minor effect.

      • insider 9.1.1
        2 December 2011 at 2:40 pm

        With the IE autofill/history function it always suggests an old page (can’t suggest a new one by definition) so I go there then look at what’s new on the comments/opinion/online window. So it’s doing the same as the front page extra click.

        • Draco T Bastard 9.1.1.1
          2 December 2011 at 2:55 pm

          That’s how I come here but FF prioritizes on the number of times you’ve been to the page (Don’t use IE so don’t know if it does the same), in other words, the autofill has The Standard as the first suggestion.

  10. ak 10
    2 December 2011 at 12:21 pm

    Congratulations Lyn, fantastic effort, a testament to your skill and er grace. So fitting in Advent: the Bog is rapidly going the way of the Truth and all paper the way of the dinosaurs. All hail the saviour of independent public political discourse!

    • lprent 10.1
      2 December 2011 at 2:12 pm

      Not me – it is the authors and commnetators. I don’t have time to write much content. That is what drags people here.

  11. randal 11
    2 December 2011 at 12:28 pm

    this is the only blog that tells it like it is without fatboy farrar or dumb bell slater slithering around in the background.
    good work LP.

  12. Mike 12
    2 December 2011 at 12:41 pm

    With Farrar’s blog, you don’t need to click on anything to see the whole article as it is always there on the page. Scroll down and there’s the next one, etc. You only need to click (creating a new page view) to get to the comments.

    With the Standard, you have to click through from the front blurb to every single article to read the article. A new page view for every article opened.

    So you are not in any way comparing apples with apples.

    The Standard is by virtue of its layout designed to get more page views than blogs that have the whole article on the front page.

  13. infused 13
    2 December 2011 at 12:59 pm

    And you have how many writers?

    Yeah no.

    • lprent 13.1
      2 December 2011 at 2:13 pm

      Yeah, but we also all have jobs, partners, and lives as well. That is why this was built as a coop site with authors moving in and out of activity. See 15.1

      But the site operations were designed with all of that in mind. That is why it has been able to operate efficiently with less of a load on each person. My operations research / production management training kicked in when I looked at what was happening at the start of 2008. It gelled pretty well with the authors at the time desires to be able to leave the site without it falling over.

      Basically that was DPF’s choice and I really don’t envy him doing it. It’d interfere with programming.

      Frankly I wasn’t interested in becoming a martyr to the site either. As it is there are only a few jobs that don’t have multiple people coverage. For some reason most of those are related to paying bills and to a certain extent with code, servers, and backups… In other words the services that Inspire provides to DPF.

      😈

      • Jackal 13.1.1
        2 December 2011 at 3:55 pm

        I like the format and the consideration for longevity. It’s amusing to see a few right wingers getting all stroppy about the numbers. I bet Farrar and Slater don’t mention it once.

        I now pronounce The Standard King/Queen of the New Zealand blogosphere 🙂

  14. Santi 14
    2 December 2011 at 1:13 pm

    April 1 already?

  15. js 15
    2 December 2011 at 2:08 pm

    Jim Mora and others in the media often mention Kiwiblog’s blogosphere supremacy in justifying giving him even more exposure. Would be good, therefore, to make more noise about the Standard being Number 1 and maybe then they would ask some Standard authors on to such things as Jim Mora’s panel.

    • lprent 15.1
      2 December 2011 at 2:19 pm

      You’d have to find an author willing to do it. My work time is always fully committed (and everyone here apart from rocky is also working – she has a young baby and uni instead) and pontificating sounds like a frigging lot of organisation for little return other than ego. My ‘spare’ time is also usually fully committed. I’d imagine that most of the others have the same time issues.

      The reason that this blog gets written and maintained is because it takes lots of little blocks of time rather than big (half hour) blocks of time. We slide them in between other things – in my case frequently in compiles or on the pad watching TV or reading.

      There are a lot of us with a vague and loose coordination (ie no meetings), so mostly the site gets covered and the posts get written. It works because it is unscheduled and loose.

  16. ianmac 16
    2 December 2011 at 2:24 pm

    Sometimes I read sneering comments posted about The Standard on Public Address. The few seem to sneer at sneering. Funny that.
    The comments on the Standard seem to cover a wide range of beliefs and a cross-section of loyalties. No wonder it has increased in popularity compared to say Kiwiblog’s unswerving obeisance to the John Key Party.

  17. randal 17
    2 December 2011 at 2:58 pm

    thestandard is democratic while the others just pretend to be.

  18. randal 18
    2 December 2011 at 2:59 pm

    kiwiblog is for people who want to despicable things to sausage rolls.

  19. Peter 19
    2 December 2011 at 3:31 pm

    I don’t like kiwiblog, its ideas and perceptions of reality are boring actually, you could get more interesting debate in a tea party rally.

  20. gingercrush 20
    2 December 2011 at 5:03 pm

    I can’t stand that stupid counter thing you’ve put on here. Its the first bloody thing that pops up along with The Standard banner.

  21. McFlock 21
    2 December 2011 at 5:35 pm

     the success of the Standard vs kb goes some way to restoring my faith in NZers, after the damned fool and poorly participated weekend result  🙂

  22. Olwyn 22
    2 December 2011 at 6:04 pm

    Thanks to the authors, and lprent in particular, for running this blog. It is by far the most interesting, and works as a genuine dialogue between people who bother to think about things. Above all, it is a reminder that not everyone, (outside of the people that I know personally), buys into the current mythology.

  23. Carol 23
    2 December 2011 at 6:45 pm

    I never go to Kiwiblog these days, and only viewed a few comments threads there in the past. I have no desire to be read the blatant homophobia and mysogyny that can be expressed by some there.

    I come to this site because such blatant nastiness is moderated out.

    [lprent: Not all of it. Enough of it. Immunization protocols. ]

    • ropata 23.1
      2 December 2011 at 11:45 pm

      Kiwiblog is one guy’s transparent toadying to his authoritarian heroes, the author is a boring nerd without much original content. Read the comments on some of farrar’s herald pieces, people outside the kb sewer see right through his posturing.

      The Standard is a community of jumbled and conflicting opinions, expressed with passion, originality and wit; always questioning the status quo. It has become NZ’s premier blog for interesting and challenging debate, some of the others like Public Address or Dim-Post are just too insipid

      • Carol 23.1.1
        3 December 2011 at 7:22 am

        PA etc has some useful posts and discussions. But to me the aim for a kind of quality and balanced debate on PA, results in quite a middleclass tone and a balance that is located around the centre of politics. I see the same kind of outcome from the characterisation by Claire Browning of the Green Party being neight left nor right, as when Browining clims Neither right nor left, but some characteristics of both.. (just another version of the third way?)

        http://www.pundit.co.nz/content/towards-a-new-theory-of-the-greens-neither-left-nor-right

        The left-right spectrum is not a totally clear line encompassing all political views from left to right, but it comes close. If you include some left and some right views, then you will largely end up somewhere near the centre.

        I like that the Standard includes diverse left wing views, without always being done in a professionalised, middleclass way, and provides some good explanations for some quite “radical” left wing views that get smeared as “extremist” in more centrist forums and media.

    • Carol 23.2
      3 December 2011 at 7:11 am

      Yes “enough of it”. That’s what I meant by referring to it as “blatant nastiness”.

  24. dad4justice 24
    3 December 2011 at 8:06 pm

    At least this blog doesn’t promote backstabbing and narking. Just look at the deranged tactics of big bruv the pathological lying creep who is always requesting demerits for me.Haha what a weak gutless wimp.

    Oh Farrar, if you are reading this can you respond to my email or was my kiwiblog return just another fat fucking lie?Ask the very ill Graeme Taylor if I can come back.

    No demerits here big blouse’s.

  25. interesting 25
    5 December 2011 at 2:01 pm

    There is a difference between page views and visitors….

    You win the “pageviews” stat…but when it comes to actual visitors Kiwiblog still beats the standard. nice spin though.

  26. interesting 26
    5 December 2011 at 2:07 pm

    Also…. to actually read your articles you have to click to go to each individual story…where as kiwiblog has most blogs on one page so you can view them without having to click on each individual page…. so comparing “page views” is not really a good measure.

  27. Deuto 27
    6 December 2011 at 9:51 am

    Good morning lprent,

    Being a complete ignoramus about such things as blog visitor rates etc, I would be interested in your views on the latest Neilson ratings as reported in this post on Public Address:

    http://publicaddress.net/hardnews/most-discursive-website/

    • lprent 27.1
      6 December 2011 at 11:05 am

      I’ll have to dig the report out (haven’t seen it for a while) and look at their methods. It is only of relevance for advertising which I only really care about for paying server costs. But from memory this is a estimated measure using the figures from the neilson plugin on the site, online questionnaires, and various other measures. But it is heavily massaged for what advertisers want to see.

      It doesn’t surprise me that PA has the most commenting readers. That is what their site does best. They have had a long time to build the regular readership.

      I’d say that it overestimates this site by quite a lot how many readers here write comment (at present I think it is approaching 1 in 5 from my preliminary look at the numbers), and under estimates the numbers of browsers reading.

      However looking at it, I’d say that they’re probably a pruning on the “browsers” to select for the numbers of regular readers. The amount is in the right order for our unique regular visitors.

      Outside of those directed in by search engines, we get a large number of readers coming in only a few times per month. We get a lot of readers coming in 200+ visits per month. There is little between because people who are interested are either reading a single post of interest, or keeping up with lots of posts and comments.

      That would also fit with what I know about the profile of public address and kiwiblog (and what I guess about pundit). The longer a site has been running (if they are successful) the more people will regularly read it. That is because you tend to accrete regular readers and commentators over time if they like the articles and community. They go away and mostly come back. The rate at which you get them depends on your “marketing” techniques

      The few times a month people are directed in by links from other sites, facebook, twitter, word of mouth, mass media, banner ads, links from sister sites (like newspapers) etc. I suspect they’re largely pruned in this neilson measure.

      But that is where we get our increase in numbers of regular readers/commentators. At present the conversion rate of the occasional readers to regular readers is reasonably high compared to most sites. That is what I’m after more than anything else.

      With the inadvertent cooperation of the mass media (who seem to hate ever mentioning us). We’ve been effectively constraining the growth or readers in the site to a reasonably steady growth rate that we can sustain. We have had times in the past where we get massive increases in readers because of something around the media or net and it blows our server or volunteer resources and the site goes slow or offline or the comments section goes unreadable from trolls. In either case we lose readers rapidly.

      That is why we’ve been slow to go in and implement things like effective facebook recommends (now account for a third of our new readers), twitter, having cards to hand out at party conferences, banner ads showing up on pundit, appearing on chat shows, getting opinion pieces in mass media, and other marketing techniques that would be trivial to implement. Each would ratchet up the sites growth significantly and in combination could ratchet it up by a lot. But I and the others have to work, blogging doesn’t pay, so we lift the site much more slowly largely through word of mouth.

      • deuto 27.1.1
        6 December 2011 at 11:13 am

        Thanks, lprent. That gives me a much better perspective – and is more than enough for me so don’t want you to spend more time on it for my sake as I know you have a heavy load already. Cheers.

        • lprent 27.1.1.1
          6 December 2011 at 1:52 pm

          Was interesting. The e-mail was there.

          I read it and I’m still a bit in the dark about what “matched unique browsers” is all about.

          But I did get around to almost doubling my comments on PA because I had an opportunity to reuse freedom’s excellent reference to coprolite. They were punning around with earth sciences and an old troll term rose out of the sediments… 😈

  28. randal 28
    6 December 2011 at 11:20 am

    kiwiblog is just a rag sponsored by the national gubmint.
    there fore it is anti democratic.