How to Measure Any Website’s Traffic (For Free)

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Have you ever wondered exactly who, what, and when people are visiting your website… or your competitors’ websites? Without knowing your audience it’s difficult to make improvements towards your end goal, whether that’s becoming internet famo, selling more widgets, or just getting more page views. Here are a few free analytic tools to help you [...]

Alexa “upgrades” ranks, algorithm

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

“The new Alexa rankings” were announced today. “Even better” they say, but there’s zero disclosure of their “new data sources” or any actual methodologies, in contrast to Compete and Comscore.

Massaging the statistics

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

#1: Brad Feld recently proclaimed your analytics are very wrong, specifically referring to: issues w/ tracking “widget” usage (like embeds), a new and imprecise science at best RSS subscriber overinflation, caused by services like Google Reader auto-subscribing new signups to your RSS feed, inaccurately jacking up the subscription numbers. This discussion just points out the [...]

How to Buy YouTube Views

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Evan Roth ran an experiment during class last semester: how many hits will $150 buy you? The rough data’s in: about 57k uniques on the page =~ about 44k views on the embedded YouTube video. The video in question being a screencast of the purchase, of course. More info: This was an experiment we did [...]

Wear your Twitter stats

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Aram Bartholl, the man who knows no boundaries, is organizing a “group-performance/conference-intervention” for the upcoming re:publica conference in Berlin called “Follow Me!”: folks will be swapping buttons w/ their Twitter avatars on it — real-world data visualization of who you’re “following” at the conference. Bartholl’s previously made IRL-vs.-internets news with real-world Google map markers and [...]

YouTube announces but doesn’t release new analytics tool

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

The blog post title is “YouTube Reveals Video Analytics Tool for All Users” but there’s no links in the article and it’s not on my personal account yet… they might’ve jumped the gun on the announcement. Ganalytics + your sexy dance videos = Google Insight Note: folks with “partner” accounts have had access to the [...]

New vid scams itself to #1 YouTube Most Viewed of All-Time?

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

Fan-made music video Alcohol-vs-Hot-Hot-Sex overtakes Evolution of Dance as YouTube’s #1 Most Viewed Video of All-Time…. but is it legit? Waxy investigates… If you look at the ratio of views-to-ratings, you’ll see the CSS video has a very unusual 21,487-to-1 ratio… the average ratio for every other video in the top 10 is a more [...]