Numbers

Every time I open my Google newsreader, I am slightly annoyed by the incestuous nature of the blogosphere. Techcrunch writes something good, and 30 other blogs write posts about it, without offering much value add. The reason it’s annoying is because if I am subscribed to those 30 blogs, I am sure as hell subscribed to Techcrunch.

But that is highly hypocritical of me, since I do the same thing all the time (case in point is this very post). In theory, I try to add my own spin, or I write for those people who I genuinely think might have missed the content I am re-posting. In the past, I have even tried to aggregate top content from many sites to make it easier for others to keep up, (and I think I shall go back to doing that). And more than that, I love it when others link to *my* blog.

But guess who is not complaining? The Techcrunch’s of this world. Because of the way authority is measured in the blogosphere, the more people who link to your posts, the more popular your blog will be deemed to be by search engines and the like. The more popular the search engines think you are, the more popular they make you by offering your content at the top of search results. I guess it’s just the way that the cookie crumbles.

Technorati is the best known tool for measuring blog authority, and they have now started a monthly feature where they list the sites (not just blogs) with the most link-backs from blogs, in the past 30 days. Not really surprisingly, 61% of links on blogs are to other blogs. But what are bloggers linking to when they are not linking to each other? This is a list of the top 50 non-blog content sites:

• YouTube
• New York Times
• BBC News
• CNN.com
• MSN
• guardian.co.uk
• Washington Post
• Yahoo! News
• Reuters
• Los Angeles Times
• Telegraph.co.uk
• MSNBC
• The Wall Street Journal
• Time
• Wired
• USA Today
• boston.com
• FOX News
• Daily Mail
• ESPN
• CBS News
• Financial Times
• Forbes
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Chicago Tribune
• The White House
• New York Post
• New York Daily News
• International Herald Tribune
• PBS
• Salon.com
• BusinessWeek
• Slate
• Newsweek
• New York Magazine
• Economist.com
• CBC.ca
• San Francisco Examiner
• MarketWatch
• Chicago Sun-Times
• US News & World Report
• Houston Chronicle
• Yahoo! Sports
• Entertainment Weekly
• Seattle Times
• E! Online
• People
• Science Daily
• Style.com
• The Christian Science Monitor

I am not sure how this was measured, since a lot of these sites have blogs, or at the very least regular columnists. But there you go. Yes, Youtube is more popular the New York Times, but overall, I am impressed by the high quality of sites that made it into the Top 50.  I wonder if the list will change much in the coming months? I suspect not.

A website needs a marketing strategy, just like any other venture.
And a marketing strategy needs some goals, and goals need numbers.
It’s a common problem: Assuming an adept marketing plan, just how many website visitors is a realistic expectation?

Of course, you can also ask how long a piece of string is. The audience numbers depend a lot on the target audience, especially if the segmentation occurs across geographic lines.

To get a clearer indication of reasonable expectations for South African websites, I decided to crunch some numbers. I used data available from the www.opa.org.za site, which represents the leading web publishers in the country. Most numbers are second quarter, 2008.

I only looked at Domestic Traffic, since I assume it is better to focus your marketing efforts on a market that is on your doorstep. Obviously, there are valid exceptions to this, but one has to start somewhere!

I started off with 103 websites that are monitored by OPA, and I ignored all email sites (such as Webmail, Mweb mail etc).

Here is what I found (rounded off):

Average unique browsers per site: 151,000

Average page impressions per site: 2.5 milion per month

Those numbers are quite impressive, but are skewed by the big players that get well over 20 million impressions per month. Once News24.com , Vodacom4me, MSN and Mweb sites are removed, the stats are as follows:

Average unique browsers per site: 103,000
Average page impressions per site: 1.4 million per month

And when I looked at all sites whose traffic was under 5 million page impressions per month, the stats are as follows (sample base of 89 sites):

Average unique browsers per site: 96,000
Average page impressions per site: 1 million per month

Assuming you are launching a new website, with a well thought out offering, marketing plan and budget, and are targetting a wide South African audience, these last numbers are most realistic. Bear in mind though, that the 89 sites that these stats come from are still made up of “big players” like Women24, Yellowpages.co.za and Fin24.co.za. These sites have worked hard to get to their status, and overnight success for you is not very likely. In order to compete in their game, you must be prepared to run a very tight and strategically brilliant venture.

Also, a lot of these sites have a strong offline presence, which acts as an excellent marketing channel.

Visual Representation of the 89 sites and their unique browsers (click for larger image):

Visual Representation of the 89 sites and their page impressions (click for larger image):

All numbers from AC Nielsen and www.opa.org.za

Of course, these stats are only representative of websites that are represented by the OPA (Online Publishers Association). That makes for a very selective bunch. If you have personal experience with drawing traffic to a new South African site, please add your comment below!

Welcome to all my new subscribers!

This is only the third blog post for Two Jumps Ahead.com, and I thought it would be a good idea to track some numbers right from the start.

Since this is a blog about Social Media, and how you can use it to extend your presence/impact/influence/reach, it is only fair that I practice what I preach and extend the impact of this blog.

And the nice thing about Social Media is that it is so measurable.

So here goes the first batch of monthly numbers:

Alexa ranking: 1,507,216

Technorati.com: 4,567,253

Amatomu.com: 1,590 (South African blogs only)

Subscribers: 7

Google mentions: 8

Comments: 1

Posts: 3

Days live: 2

Visitors: 26

Here’s to a heroic rise in all these rankings!