I confess: I’ve been engaged here at the League for this long only so that I can get my hands on the behind-the-scenes interface. Now that Erik has fallen for my long-laid plan, I’m going to let the rest of the community see some of the site behind the curtain.
I’m a data nut, so sue me.
I started reading this site long enough ago that I don’t remember exactly when I started. Of course, the site existed before I started reading it, and like any newbie I read a few of the older posts to try and grok the context of both the posters and the frequent visitors. Of course, this is limited to a very brief overview; suffice to say my original impressions of most of you weren’t entirely borne out by the months since.
Here’s some interesting side notes for the viewing public.
The home page has netted close to a million views since January 2009, the whole site has over two and a half million views. This says that more than half of our traffic comes from following direct links or searches to individual posts, which is an interesting note.
Feb 2011 was our best month. Tongue-in-cheek note to the community: we should draft a committee to analyze our postings in Feb 2011 so that we can tailor our deliverables to the synergy of the inside and outside community, to increase our ability towards monetization of the site. Because we’re totally missing out on traffic, here. Looking below: we need more pictures of Megan Fox, for one thing, and definitely more posts pointing at other bloggers so that we can suck up their readership.
There are 4,674 total posts on the blog. There are 412 Drafts (one of which is a draft of this one), and 14 posts in the trash, at least two of which have an interesting enough title that I’m dying to read them, but ethics forbids. I’d post more about the Drafts section, but that might be getting too deep into everyone’s writing process than is strictly kosher without an okay. Lest the other writers feel unease: I’m not even looking at that section, I swear.
Our number one blog post by views is this one by Jason. The top ten looks like this:
- Jason’s
- E.D.’s content-less Megan Fox picture
- E.D.’s interview with Charles Johnson of LGF
- E.D.’s post about mathematics education
- E.D.’s writeup about a lecture by Art Spiegelman
- E.D.’s post about April Fool’s jokes on the web
- Mark Thompson’s Pigford post
- E.D.’s post about getting on Mark Levin’s “Deranged Blogger” list
- E.D.’s post about Steven Colbert and conservative self-parodying.
- Chris Dierkes on Glenn Beck
This of course is dramatically different from the top ten posts by comments.
- E.D.’s post about Libertarianism and Power, 431 comments
- Jason on Birtherism, 401 comments
- Jason on “The middle class isn’t dying”, 384 comments
- Elias (as a Guest Blogger) on America, Forever at War, 346 comments
- Rufus on Lucretius, 337 comments
- The redoubtable Mr. Thompson, on Robert Smalls, 335 comments
- E.D.’s Labor 2.0 post, 319 comments
- Jason’s post in counter to Balloon Juice, 316 comments
- Mark on Reasonable People, 314 comments
- James K on Libertarianism and Privilege, 311 comments
At some point I’ll analyze our wordy lot and find out who blathers the most.
So we’re all agreed that we need more Megan Fox pictures, right?Report
We could probably get away with just bogarting the occasional bit from TMZ or something.
Personally, Ms. Fox isn’t to my taste.Report
There’s always the Outside the Beltway model. As best as I can tell, he makes money off of his entertainment/sports blogs with sporadic updating. He might make more off those than he does the principal site.Report
I used to love at my old blog to find what search terms led people there. I think my favourite was the unfathomable search term “plethysmograph homolka” (I’m not explaining either of those terms! It sounds like the name of a punk singer.)Report
My favorite search terms result in a visit at my blog was, “Polson MT bondage dungeon”.
I’ve never written about bondage dungeons, but I have written about dungeons (of the “and dragons” sort) and I have written about Polson.
Always made me wonder who was looking for kink there…Report
The inner-marketer in me wants to point out the unfulfilled niche opportunities you are currently missing.Report
One of my co-bloggers wrote an in-depth post on the Canadian government (well, a quasi-governmental body) looking into regulating the pricing of ISPs (the big Usage-Based Billing debate up here).
In talking about internet use, he referenced Mexican Donkey Porn. You can guess what search string always winds up in our stats.Report
And now that you’ve posted this comment here, guess what search string will now wind up in the LoOG stats…Report
It’s taking over the world!Report
Very useful post, Patrick. Thanks!Report
Interesting that there’s not a single crossover between comments/view top 10, I suppose when you say critical things of other bloggers their fan base swings by to write one nasty comment and then doesn’t come back (and do so quickly and then stop), while the substantive discussions that drag out for days result in somewhat less comments, but lots of opportunity for those of us following the discussion to check in several times to see what’s new.Report
I bet the highest comment count posts represent largely two-four League regulars back-n-forth’ing in the comments.
Comment analysis is going to be hard; the interface is klunky for that sort of thing. Not to mention the fact that people have different handles.Report
(Looks at the League trash folder.)
All I have there are two old drafts of posts that eventually went up – “A Note on Athenian Pederasty” and “Why I Hate Politics.” A third, “What Would It Take to Un-Marry You?” I think eventually went into my Cato Policy Analysis “Marriage Against the State,” though in somewhat modified form.
The rest aren’t mine.Report