Chris Dixon

  • December 14, 2011

cdixon.org site statistics

I hadn’t looked at cdixon.org site logs in over a year until today.  Here are the numbers according to the Dreamhost panel:

I’ve been blogging more lately which explains why Dec 2011 is tracking to be up near 2M page views (although frankly that number seems high to me- I wonder if somehow they are counting each page view multiple times – maybe due to the way WordPress works?)

As if we needed another reminder of how wrong Compete data is here is their chart:

Not even directionally correct.  Yeah they show UVs and not pageviews but I don’t see any reason those would have gotten decoupled.

(I had cdixon.org tagged with Quantcast for a while but removed it a few weeks ago –  their chart when cdixon.org was tagged makes more sense (as you’d expect)).

I blog just for fun / hobby, so don’t really care about these stats. But it’s interesting to see the (in)correctness of these popular analytics services.

  • http://www.facebook.com/sammy.shreibati Sammy Shreibati

    Could many people consume your blog from Twitter, thus being be on mobile? 

    What does your Google Analytics say?

    • http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

      i actually don’t have google analytics set up, but should do so. i have really tried to stay away from the “page view games” when blogging. mostly just try to get interesting comments that lead to new blog posts.

      • http://www.facebook.com/sammy.shreibati Sammy Shreibati

        I agree. Pageviews are a vanity metric, for the most part. Although Pinterest really brought those back, but I digress.

        GA for a blog is useful because it helps with questions like: where does your traffic come from, time on site, and retention. 

        Although, I use Pulse to read your posts, so I suppose that isn’t tracked by GA.  

        • http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

          according to dreamhost, 25% of my visits come from hacker news. 50% come from “direct visits” which i suspect are twitter and unknown blog readers like pulse since dreamhost analytics are basically state of the art 1980s technology.

          • http://twitter.com/lchamberlin Luke Chamberlin

            I type “cdixon.org” into my browser about once per week to read new posts. This is how I get to most of the blogs I follow.

          • http://twitter.com/startupdispatch Startup Dispatch

            People who know you – personally, professionally or ‘just as that guy who made Hunch’ (that would include me) – are likely to type in your site’s address into their browsers.

  • http://www.alearningaday.com Rohan

    I tend to trust Google Analytics .. like @facebook-204273:disqus 

    And those are sweet numbers in any case. :) Nice work!

  • http://twitter.com/#!/chrishuntis/ chrishuntis

    i use g analytics. 

    also, keep a http://topsy.com/ tab open. using the site: operator you can see engagement.  

  • http://www.the-makegood.com Matt Straz

    Chris regardless of the number your traffic is way up because this is one of the most thoughtful and consistently informative blogs in tech. Its refreshing to got a regular view from an entrepreneur and not just a VC.

    It’s also got a smart group people who read and share here.

    I find the site invaluable. Keep it up!

    • http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

      Thanks! that’s very nice of you.

  • http://joshhaas.com Josh Haas

    WordPress / Dreamhost is my blogging platform of choice too.  Did you have to do anything special to get your setup to scale to handle that kind of traffic?

    • http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

      no, just default config.

  • http://veespo.com David Semeria

    RSS dude checking in..

  • http://www.ma-dissertations.com/freelance-writing-jobs writing career

    Hm. interesting, but i don`t think that it wiil be very useful for me.

  • http://twitter.com/sdoering Sven Doering

    Well the Dreamhost-Panel seems to show requests. So every time the brwoser “asks” the server for something (text, image, javascript, et al) a request is made. so naturally requests are a factor X higher than pageviews. 

    but, the stats-game is some kind of vanity-game. ;-) So nice to see, but not so important, as comments. 

    • http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

      I agree. Comments – in particular *quality comments* – are the most important metric.