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April 1, 2010

ToTG Sets Record!

No, not a late April Fool's joke, but this blog actually set a record for visits today. (well, a record for this blog) The increased traffic resulted from the post Google Changes Name and came from the hoax post at the official Google blog.

Here are screenshots from our Flag Counter widget:

Weekly visitors



The dark blue denotes new visitors (1,303) and the light blue is the total counter views. (1,687). I'm sure most of the total above and beyond the first-time views is from me popping back in here so many times watching the numbers climb on the Feedjit widget. I couldn't keep up with the count, but at one time I estimate there were over a hundred hits in less than a minute.

Here is the graph for monthly visitors:



The previous record for visitors was something on the order of 200+ when a post about the marquee tag was linked to from a Mozilla forum with another post about the Cast Away crossroads following close behind. (and that one wasn't about the movie, but was from an alternative energy thread in a forum and meant to illustrate how flat and suitable this area is for wind generators)

What did I learn from this? Well, if I want to increase hits, all I have to do is link to the Google blog. First, though, I'll need to load this blog up with ads.

Nah, THAT would be a joke, thinking I could make money off of this blog.



UPDATE: As I predicted, yesterday had our second largest number of visitors, with 399 first-time visitors and 515 total.

There also was an increase in hits on the "Cast Away" posts; it must have been showing on TV.

4 comments:

Mike said...

And, since I linked to the Google blog in THIS post, I'm gettin' hits on this one.

Barb said...

I'm sure there are researchers who have already studied this but I wonder what makes a link likely to get hit? Must be a combination of curiosity and relevancy

Mike said...

At the Google blog, there was a list of sites which linked to it. Even as ToTG went down the list as newer ones were added, we still got loads of hits.

The Flag Counter's "day" ends at seven o'clock CST but I noticed there were quite a few hits after it reset. I expect today will probably be the second largest number.

It was probably due to the fact that they had to be signed into one of any of the several comment options that there were no comments on this or the other post, but I sure figured someone would after the Sarah Palin Big Govt. link I left.

Thanks for posting!

Mike said...

Big Journalism, not Big Govt. Both sites are owned by Breitbart, along with Big Hollywood. I subscribe to all three.