Are you asking the right questions?
Generally, I don’t seek out the news. I often hear it, but I will change the station or channel if I feel the news diverts from need-to-know information to what I might consider fear-inducing or just flat out depressing information. A large world topic and one specifically close to the hearts and minds of Canadians is our large and ongoing involvement in Afghanistan. As you may or may not know, two weeks ago France answered Canada’s/NATO’s request for more troops (a thousand, I believe).
I was listening to CBC RadioOne (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) as a reporter interviewed a professor about the announcement of France’s involvement. The professor, from the University of Calgary, had a very interesting comment. The reporter asked—Will the additional troops help? And the professor responded—Yes and no. Yes, because—of course—a thousand extra troops will help. But, no because it signaled that NATO was not asking the right questions. Because sure they will help, but once you reach a thousand extra troops do all the problems go away and the nation will be peaceful and safe? No. Will they likely need more troops? Yes, but how do you ask for more because you just got the thousand you needed. The question and answer of numbers is not an affective approach. Perhaps the question should be—How can we affectively manage peaceful relations between all interested parties in Afghanistan? Or how can we create sustainable development? And so on.
When did we get so obsessed with numbers? Personally, I blame Modernism. But, I won’t get into that.
When we decided to put ads on Epiblogger we had to answer the first question—How much will it cost? And in order to give a number, we had to consider more numbers. So we started to look around. Lee showed me this post on Problogger. I showed Lee what Ben was doing at openswitch. After four months what do we have at Epiblogger for numbers?
- 80 RSS subscribers
- Alexa Rank: 129787
- 3 Articles a week
- 4000+ Page views per month
- And one time we got stumbled and had 1000 people in one day!
- Page rank: 0 (Awesome!)
At this point, you might begin to wonder where I am going with this. This is the way we do things. But I am an idealist and I like to do things the way I think they should be done. But can I ask the question—are we asking the right questions?
As I am writing this, I am chatting with Lee. I don’t know anything about Alexa. I asked him if we had a good number. He said compared to our other blogs—yes, but compared to Problogger—no.
I know it’s shocking everyone. Maybe sit down. I had to. I couldn’t believe that Problogger has bigger numbers than us (I want you all to know that I am severely biting my tongue here and keeping things clean (I do all my profane stuff on IttyBiz anyway)).
The problems with numbers is that they really don’t tell much of a story and depending on the question (or context) you can really get any answer. For instance, The Sports Dollar did a little experiment with Entrecard. It showed some interesting numbers.
The major goal with this experiment was to determine if forking out credits for the big dogs was really worth it. Did we get new readers or see a spike in traffic on the days that we were advertising on these blogs? Here are the results.
If you go and take a look at the results they saw 29 people come through from our Entrecard and a mere 39 from Problogger. That tells me that our audience is awesome, supportive and inquisitive and that Probloggers are different. Maybe they are there just for Darren or just to get some info and get out. Are they interested in the (Entrecard) community? I don’t know. Or maybe, like the one commenter says, Problogger’s audience is smart enough not to click on Entrecard. You could read those numbers a bunch of different ways. And that’s a problem.
I am an idealist, so sue me. But doesn’t it make more sense to advertise places where your voice will be heard or on a place that you respect? Shouldn’t you ask—will I be seen here? Is this audience like me? Are the authors original like me? Do I believe this blog is valuable to me? And so on. I would rather advertise on 20 smaller blogs that I thought were amazing than spend it all on one big one.
I think we should declare peace on numbers, realize that there are times they are beneficial (like when measuring medicine), but that we are allowed to think outside, around and through numbers to ask the hard questions. That’s what I am going to do. Who’s with me? I need at least 8 of you to agree so I feel validated.
Photo by Paul Downey
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5 Comments
I heard my name and profanity in the same paragraph so I had to stop by and run my mouth off.
First off, for what I’m assuming is a relatively new blog (am I talking out of my ass here?) most of your numbers are pretty good. To use IttyBiz as an example, we’re PR 4, have a few thousand subscribers and monthly page views come in around 30K. The page views is low for a blog our size but we don’t get relevant search engine traffic and everybody’s reading through RSS. Our Alexa is 113K, only 15K or so above yours.
When it comes to the ad question — and for IB clients, it’s a big one — it all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you want to eventually secure substantial ad revenue, what you want is traffic. Whether they like you and send you presents in the mail is pretty irrelevant — you just need asses in the seats. A targeted ad on a big site gets said asses in said seats. They don’t usually come back, but enough new ones come that it makes up for it. If you want loyal readers, more intimate ads on smaller blogs will likely convert much better.
|’m not going to go on a big rant about how loyal readers are better — I think “readers” is a pretty morally neutral term — but if you want loyal you’re probably not going to get them from an ad on Problogger or Zen Habits. We (okay, I) was spazzing out about my Technorati ranking. It dropped like a rock when our first six months was up and I was all up in arms. Then I realized my blog had turned to shit because I was so busy thinking about how to up my rank. Uncool for my readers, and uncool for my psyche.
So that was my 8972 cents. I am one of the 8 to agree. Chill about the numbers.
I think that any numbers need to be taken in context. Traffic stats that are great for one blog may be seen as a failure in a different market.
Remember there are lies, damn lies and then statistics
Naomi: Thanks for stopping by. Yup, we are only four months old. Yes, I am trying to relax on the numbers. I don’t see why I can’t have loyal readers and big money ads/asses in seats. I want both. I don’t care what idioms or general truths exist to tell me how greedy I am. This is Canada and I want the American dream!
Steve: I think you’re absolutely right. I wish I remembered that quote. That’s a good one.
As an engineer numbers are really important but they should not be all consuming. The best engineers/scientists will weigh the numbers against their gut feel and be prepared to go with their gut feeling. It would seem to me that you are getting a good consistent response to Epiblogger, the numbers should be considered as suggestions for future direction and weighed against what you want to do but they shouldn’t define the path forward.
Thanks Dad! I guess you engineers have a heart after all!