(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Tuesday, June 18, 2002
PENIS WARS CONTINUE: Glenn Reynolds continues to discuss the length of his cock, despite his constant remarks that he doesn't care about it. Glenn has this latest gem:
Extreme Tracker, which counts only the main page, reports 226,916 unique visitors so far this month, for whatever that's worth.
So, what is it worth?
According to the quoted figures, Instapundit gets about 15,000 unique visitors each weak. Of these we need to work out how many are one-hit-wonders there are [floaters] and how many regular visitors there are [repeaters]. The big problem is that floaters will use several IPs over the course of a day, with the impact growing over the period of a month. For instance, an AOL user who logs on the internet and surfs to Instapundit twice a day will show up as two unique visitors on one day, 14 across a week, and 60 unique visitors across a month because of the roaming AOL IP addresses. In other words, the Instapundit unique figures get worse and worse as time goes on.
So let's mess with the maths as an example.
Assuming the figures are correct, if Reynolds is getting ~211,000 uniques a month, then about 6,800 of his 15,000 average visitors/week are floaters, with the remaining 8,200 his actual loyal audience ((6,800[floaters] x 30[days]) + 8,200[repeaters] = 212,200). This, of course, is only accurate if the repeaters only count once. The problem is, they don't.
So looking at the weekly figure, the breakout is more like 11,500 of the 15,000 are floaters, with the remaining 3,500 repeaters ((11,500[floaters] x 7[days]) + 3,500[repeaters] = 84,000). This, again, is only accurate if the repeaters only count once.
This is radically different - the monthly figures showing 8,200 repeaters, the weekly figures showing only 3,500. The fact of the matter is that the repeaters have a massive impact on the unique figures due to changing IP addresses.
Which figures are more accurate? It's hard to say. At best we can say that the loyal Instapundit audience is somewhere between 3,500 and 8,200 loyal readers, with the remaining views borne of people floating in on referral, web searches or simple spidering and never come back to Instapundit.
With 8,200 loyal readers at best, the New York Times need not fear Reynolds just yet. posted by wrongwaygoback12:04 AM
The Watchers
WBW: Keeping track of the war exhortations of the warbloggers.