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OJR: Focusing on the future of digital journalism

Online Journalism Discussion

FWIW: A little example of blog popularity

OJR's referral logs from the past week provide some data on Web traffic from top blogs and social bookmarking sites.

Submitted by Robert Niles
Posted: 2007-03-19
I found this interesting, so I thought I'd pass it along. Make of this whatever you wish....

As you might know, we had a, um, rather popular article up on OJR last week: Laura Ruel's and Nora Paul's look at eyetracking research. It was an informative, useful article for Web designers... but that wasn't the main reason the article drew so much traffic.

*That* would be because of George Brett's crotch.

At the end of the piece, Paul and Ruel examine eyetracking research that revealed men tend to fixate on "private parts" as well as faces, while women keep their gaze "up north," if you will. A great little datum, and it lit up the blogosphere.

Here are the top 25 referrers to OJR from the past week, as recorded by Google Analytics. I find the numbers interesting in what they reveal about the relative popularity of some well-known blogs and social bookmarking services. (The number following the domain is the total of unique visitors sent from that site.)

boingboing.net 8373
kottke.org 7508
defamer.com 1416
del.icio.us 1365
digg.com 1321
fayerwayer.com 1084
bloglines.com 818
news.com.au 659
popxpop.com 568
towleroad.com 563
clicked.msnbc.msn.com 558
fleshbot.com 496
uxmag.com 475
valleywag.com 435
retecool.com 434
techmeme.com 424
neatorama.com 423
forums.somethingawful.com 346
bluebus.com.br 334
popurls.com 333
thepeculiarone.blogspot.com 332
blogs.siliconvalley.com 320
towleroad.typepad.com 312
netvibes.com 288
nightcharm.com 276

Of course, it is possible, even likely, that readers encountered the link to OJR on multiple blogs. I'll infer that an interested reader would have clicked to OJR from the first blog he/she read which included the link. Also, if a popular blog linked to the piece, but its readers weren't the sort to click through to this sort of thing, then the number of referrals from that blog wouldn't reflect its relative popularity.

But it's still a fun list to look at. Of course, now I must enter therapy and examine just what the heck I'm doing here as OJR's editor now that I've put up a piece which got us linked from Fleshbot. :)

[That's the adult industry blog from Nick Denton's Gawker Media empire, for those who don't know. The site is totally NSFW, of course.]

Responses:

From Mac Slocum on March 20, 2007 at 2:54 PM

What I find interesting about these types of traffic spikes is that they often run in two directions. Sometimes, a big site picks up a story and it then ripples through other sites. Other times, a smaller site links and it eventually ripples out to a big site. There's a thesis in there somewhere ;)