In the next few days, this blog will record its 100,000th hit since it went live 17 October 2004 — who could have imagined? That’s huge. Traffic has died off over the past year, but that’s still an impressive number. It’s also terribly misleading.
Most of our traffic is currently driven by the world famous Led Zeppelin Sucks post — in which I say nothing of the kind. That post has directed over 30,000 of those hits. Some of those users do look around the blog a bit after posting their flames, most of which I don’t even release anymore.
The next largest chunk comes from that damned Crazy Frog or Coldplay posts (there are two 1 and 2). Those visitors are worthless, and they also account for around 30,000 hits, but for a while it was sending nearly 75% of our traffic until Yahoo stopped listing us first. They come, read, and leave on the provided links, so it’s not quality traffic. They aren’t even nice enough to click on one of my Google Adsense Ads. Laugh, but those pennies can add up, and I always appreciate anyone who helps support our site. But ultimately, this isn’t about the money because I haven’t made any yet 🙂
The rest of the traffic is mysterious. I analyze my blog traffic regularly and there’s no real pattern. I always hope some of the visitors tell me why they came but I get very few comments aside from the aforementioned Led Zeppelin Sucks post, which is a magnet of sorts for comments — not all intelligent.
I thought my random post about the nude Harry Potter pictures would garner traffic, and they did but very little. Amazingly my post on Terry Goodkind’s Phantom have generated some nice traffic — by that I mean quality traffic, the people who stay and look around. Some of these folks even go to my website.
Google Analytics and Stat Counter are very useful, though for most sites Stat Counter is better suited. The Google Analytics page is more practical for corporate sites as it’s pretty complex and overly complex.