Weighing blog traffic.

Duncan Black is touchy about something I said about his traffic. I suggested he gets a lot of traffic through minimal posts, including many "open thread" announcements. That is, people use the main page as a portal to the comments window. Of course, he should be touchy, because he makes a lot of money from ads, the advertisers rely on the traffic numbers, and the ads do not appear on the comments pages.

His average daily traffic, per Site Meter, read today, is 169,709. The average visit, however, is a mere 4 seconds, perhaps as readers jump over to the comments window, which Site Meter doesn't measure. By contrast, my average visitor stays 181 seconds. So, though I lack his immensely high traffic, if you multiply my daily traffic (10,827) times the seconds spent looking at the page, you get 1,959,687. Do the same multiplication on his numbers, and you get 678,836. Isn't that interesting? I'd like to see someone do a ranking of the blogs based on this statistic! On this standard, I even beat Kos! With 2 second visits, he's at 1,485,224.

Yeah, would somebody please produce this ranking?

UPDATE: Or am I wrong in the way I understand how Site Meter counts visit length? Here's the first comment on this post:

Ann you don't understand that sitemeter only measures a visit length when you move to the comments window. If a blog had no comments then visit length would hover near zero except for those few people who clicked on the archives. His lower visit time means that there are a lot of zero length visits which stay solely on the main page. Your higher visit time means that you have many active participants in your comment section. I don't think you proved what you thought you did.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Visit time is inaccurately measured by Site Meter, but it's still something, otherwise it would make no sense for them to include it on their charts. And I hardly think people stay on Eschaton's main page, since it's full of very short posts, often simply announcing an open thread. Some portion of zeroes are apparently averaged in, where Site Meter records no movement within the blog, but we all get zeroes averaged in. I'm just pointing out an extreme difference in these numbers. Today, November 26, my average visit time is up to 3 minutes and 48 seconds. I think avertisers ought to know that some blogs keep their readers on the page much longer than others. This is an important factor, even if a fully accurate statistic can't be produced.