Blog traffic has really shifted in ways I can’t explain recently. Starting in late September there was an abrupt decline in traffic which persisted for over a month, and then suddenly things appear to be returning to normal. The above shows the upward trend for blog traffic despite the blog being down much of yesterday. I expect things to level out and probably decline around the holidays.
I’m wondering if this is unique here or if other bloggers experienced such a shift. Did people reduce surfing the web when the television season started and now start returning to the blogosphere?
This is an easily explained phenomenon. My computer went down in Sept. and I’ve just recently been able to visit your blog on a regular basis!
That explains it all! I just didn’t notice that the temporary loss of over a thousand hits a day were all from your computer. 🙂
Yup – and my finger is worn to a nub.
I had no traffic at all in September, but I never have any traffic at all. So I can’t be sure if it had anything to do with the tv season or not. I know some of it had to do with Leslie’s computer going down, because at the time it went down she was the only person reading my blog. 😉
Â
More seriously, I actually had a major upswing in activity of a few weeks length from late September or early October mid-late October after getting a hat-tip from Southern Beale.
Â
For a few days I had lots of new traffic and many more comments than usual… which is to say I actually had comments. 😉
Â
Since then my traffic has dipped back to something closer to my ‘normal’ levels, but there has been a slight rise in what appears to be the normal level. Which, of course, worries me… because if people start actually reading my stuff the death threats will come any day now. 😉
Â
Â
Leslie,
Even if you wore your finger to a nub clicking on the site, it would increase page views but the site meter also tracks overall visits and all your clicks would only count as one visit. Both total visits and page views fell at the same rate.
We can’t blame it on Leslie. I doubt it can be explained by television.
I typically don’t get on my computer at all on the two days a week (typically Thursday and Friday) that I don’t work, except to manage my schedule for the coming week. I took a relatively lengthy semi-hiatus from blogging awhile back… but that was way back in June and July. August was when I got really active again and I’ve been bugging you here again ever since.
Â
Two things I did over the past month which have increased traffic have been joining Beltway Blips and increased integration with social networking such as Facebook and Twitter.
While these have brought in more traffic, the amount is trivial compared to the vast fluctuations over the last couple of months. The blog went from an average of around 2500 page views per day to about 1500 and is now back around 2500. (The above graph is moving average, and today’s upward movement is more dramatic now that it doesn’t end on Friday when the blog was down).
I figure that fluctuations of this magnitude can only be if for some reason overall blog traffic fluctuated and I was caught in such a trend, or (probably more likely unless others experienced this) some difference in how Google and possibly other search engines were ranking posts here on searches.
The changes in RSS readership might have had an impact, but the real drop was about a month earlier. Newsgator, one of the biggest on line RSS viewers, shut down, dropping average daily RSS subscribers from over 7000 to around 900. It has since rebound slightly to around 1500, along with an increase in email subscriptions. Some bloggers are saying that Feedburner (which tracks RSS subscribers) is not tracking many of the people who moved from Newsgator to some other products, giving falsely low counts. I also suspect that people added lots of blogs to their Newsgator accounts in the past and when it went under many have started doing other things on line as opposed to using their RSS readers.