Tag - traffic

Bing & Yahoo send less traffic in a month than Google in a day

May 5, 2011
John Koetsier
news

I know Bing is getting better and better at search. I know they’re even increasing their market share, and not just because they’re also driving Yahoo! search results now.

Frankly, more power to them – competition in any space drives improvements for all of us. So I hope they continue to push Google and both companies get better at finding and organizing information.

But this is really weird. You’d think that if Bing drives about 30% of the searches on the internet, I would see some traffic here at Sparkplug 9 from them. Or from Yahoo. You’d think wrong:

See that big blue chunk of the pie? The 96.91%? Yup, that’s Google’s share of search-engine-driven traffic to this site. It’s not all traffic – I get a ton of traffic from StumbleUpon and other sites. But traffic from search engines is a big chunk of my traffic … and almost all of it is straight from Google.

Perhaps it’s audience – my topics are not interesting to the typical Bing or Yahoo user? That’s possible. But so much less interesting? Kinda hard to believe.

In any case, Bing and Yahoo! send less traffic to my blog in a month than Google in a day.

Wow.

StumbleUpon is a traffic magnet for bloggers

May 3, 2011
John Koetsier
news

I’ve recently incorporate social sharing icons from Share Post on Sparkplug 9 stories. You’ll see them on blog post pages … right above the story.

The interesting thing for me recently is the numbers from StumbleUpon. For example, check out stumbles on this recent post:

I’m not a long-term StumbleUpon user. In fact, I’ve just started, and it’s taken me a while to get a degree of comfort and familiarity with the service. It’s a very cool way of discovering new content.

From a web publisher’s perspective, however, it’s also a great way to get traffic and attention for content. As you can see from above … something that I posted a few days ago has been viewed by 681 SU users, while only tweeted, shared, or seen on LinkedIn a couple of times.

That’s cool, and that’s enough to make me want to continue to explore and use StumbleUpon, and contribute to the community as a user while benefitting from it as a content producer.

Digg is dead (and it dug it's own grave)

February 11, 2011
John Koetsier
news

Remember the Digg effect? It was the second major moniker for a tidal wave of traffic (the Slashdot effect was first).

The tidal wave was caused, of course, by a massive community that shared links. When one became popular and reached the home page, thousands upon thousands of surfers would flood a website … resulting in much the same effect as the barbarian hordes descending on Rome: servers would melt down in flames.

In response, of course, everyone who wanted traffic and thought that sort of disaster was a nice problem to have put the Digg button on their site … one of the first (after Technorati, I think) social sharing buttons on the web.

However, after multiple community upheavals, redesigns, and months of dithering, Digg’s traffic dropped significantly last year. And it isn’t coming back.

Which was fairly obvious from this:

This is just a random TechCrunch post, but see the numbers:

  • Digg: 5 diggs
  • Twitter: 818 tweets
  • Facebook: 167 likes
  • Google Buzz: 100 shares

Only 5 diggs!

In other words, Digg is increasingly less relevant. As site owners notice and start to remove it from their preferred social bookmarking buttons, this will only increase.

RIP Digg. You dug the hole.

Subscribe to my Substack