My blog got Stumbled Upon!
My post yesterday, “10 reasons why I’m glad I switched to a Mac!” was submitted by someone (thanks, whoever you are) to StumbleUpon. I have never actually used StumbleUpon myself, but from what I’ve seen and heard it’s a sort of social bookmarking feature which lets people reccomend things they read, and it then get picked up by others looking for something similar.
One of the reasons I could never be bothered to try it out myself is that from what I can tell, it requires you to install a plugin for your browser, which is something I’m not really fond of. A lot of people use the service however, and I thought it would be interesting to see the details of how my it affected my stats.
On a normal day, according to AwStats, I receive around 120-something visitors on average. These visitors rack up around 1000 pageviews in total, which definately seems to be slightly overrated, but I’ll get back to that later. Yesterday when my article was picked up by the StumbleUpon service, 1200 people found their way to my blog, accumulating over 6300 pageviews. Not too bad! This actually matches up quite well with my Google Analytics stats like unique visitors do for the most part, but when it comes to pageviews these two stats-trackers seem to disagree. Analytics concistently reports a much lower number of pageviews compared to AwStats, and I believe Google is actually the most reliable party here. The individual pageviews for yesterday’s post match up quite well with the visitor stats, but none of the other pages shot up significantly in terms of views. Sounds odd seeing how high the number of pageviews supposedly was.
All in all, it does indeed seem that the debated myth about people discovering a blog through social bookmarking reading and leaving stands pretty strong. Take for instance the stats for my feed subscriptions. Despite the thousand something people who visited yesterday, only two new people subscribed. Additionally, the comments weren’t exactly flooded. I’m not complaining however! I’m glad that people are even reading what I have to say, and if someone finds it interesting enough to come back at a later time, well then that makes me even happier!
As a small curiosity I’ll add that if you look closer at the left menu, you can see that I added a couple of links. Those very few blogs are the ones that I read on a regular basis, and I would definately reccomend that you check them out. They are for the most part particularly interesting to other bloggers.