Internet Advertising Hits A Roadblock
The internet advertising world has turned into a multi-billion dollar per year business. With more avenues for advertisers than ever before, this trend seems to be going nowhere but up. But one problem may halt the ever-increasing industry – Hits!
Without a universal way to measure a websites value an advertiser really has no way to determine how much they will spend to show their ads on a site. Industry experts such as ComScore and Nielsen have made a great deal by offering up their ESTIMATES on a sites traffic. Both services vary heavily on their estimates though.
One example in this hotly debated topic is Style.Com. Style’s internal stat counters showed a total of 1.8 million visits in August while ComScore and Nielsen showed dramatically lower ratings. ComScore estimated traffic to be 421,000 hits while Nielsen was a little more optimistic with 497,000 hits estimated.
Will industry growth continue at this rapid pace without a rock solid statistic to base it on? I’m sure it will continue to grow, but I think the pace might slow down until we can reach some sort of universal count on how many hits a site actually generates. Alexa, Technorati, and the above mentioned stat services might be a good indication of a sites popularity, but it is by no means an exact science. What will it take to get one global method of counting statistics?
Can You Find The 9 Faces?
As you probably know I’m really into all things Blog Traffic as part of my Blog Traffic King exploits (join my list if you are into blogging) and today I’m participating in the second trial of what is called a “Blog Boost”.
I’m a member of a Yahoo! Group called LinkedIn Bloggers, who’s mission is to:
Linkedin (TM) Bloggers is a unique forum, where members of the Linkedin network (http://www.linkedin.com) meet to discuss how blogging and related technologies, such as podcasting, video blogging (‘vlogging’) and wikis can support their professional networking and self-promotion in the spirit of Linkedin. It is not a technical forum although there are inevitably discussions about technology from time to time.
There are some fairly high profile members including Dave Taylor, Darren Rowse and Des Walsh so I think it’s got great potential as a blogging “think tank”.
The blog boost concept is something we are testing to help increase the exposure of some of the great blogs in the group. The idea here is to firstly create blog awareness and also test the power of a network traffic effect, hence the interest of my alter ego, the Blog Traffic King.
Boost Target: Me, Myself & I
Today’s blog boost target is Me, Myself & I.
In particular check out this post – 9 Faces – Find ‘em – where you have to locate nine faces within a painting.
Previous Results
The first blog boost recipient, EMail OverLoaded, had fantastic results from the boost and reported back this rundown of events (summarized by Perceptric):
- 16 bloggers (mainly LinkedIn Bloggers) posted items linking to the blog. These brought an extra 102 visitors
- At some point the blog entered the del.icio.us/popular list, giving an extra 39 visitors.
- The sharp increase in traffic got the blog listed at the bottom of the 10 fastest-growing Wordpress.com blogs. This list is seen by 120,000 Wordpress.com bloggers on their dashboards when they log in. This gave an extra 96 visits, and started it climbing to become #1 on the list.
- Robert Scoble, Wordpress.com’s most famous blogger, must have seen this list on his dashboard and promptly Scobleized the blog. Although he called the blog a “Z-list blogger”, he did have a creative explanation for it
- Being Scobleized caused the numbers to continue to shoot up, getting the blog onto the list of the day’s 10 hottest Wordpress.com blogs (distinct from fastest-growing), that is displayed on Wordpress.com’s front page. It held at #5, and attracted an extra 46 visitors.
- On the second day, traffic started arriving via Lifehack.org and Lifehacker.com, which both posted excerpts of the targets posts, and 43Folders.com which added the blog to their Recent Links list. More people delved deeper into the blog, and commented on the posts.
- Google ranking improved:
email productivity: was #12 (page 2), now #1 (page 1)
email overload: was #60 (page 6), now #1 (page 1)- Google was fast to recognize links and traffic, Technorati was slow: didn’t increase its count of number of blogs that linked to the target.
- A small community of coordinated bloggers acting in unison can set in motion a process that brings a large amount of traffic in a short time. The paradox is that the bulk of the traffic does not come from these blogs — it’s due to the threshold effect
- Once you exceed the threshold necessary to become listed on a popular “top 10″ list, the rate of acceleration increases significantly, getting more traffic with less effort.
- 700 extra visitors generated 1000extra page views, which means that the majority of these opportunistic visitors landed on the site, but did not click on any internal links. Until the boost traffic had been very targeted, so visitors typically read more than just one article. On the other hand, there were 9 comments, each a chance to interact with a reader.
It’s cool to see the chain of traffic travel as each element kicks off another trigger leading to more traffic. It will be interesting to read the results of this second blog boost. I’ll let you know if I have anything to report back to you.
