It won’t last, but it looks like the links generated by Katherine’s excellent Maher Arar posts have pushed us over into Marauding Marsupial territory for the first time. Katherine rules!
(pause)
OK, question for the more experienced bloggers reading this: it’s been two months since we started, more or less. Average daily traffic 948, last 24 hours 2560. 76/70 links on Ecosystem. Is this good? Bad? Average? I have no idea what the baseline is.
Moe
I read someplace a while back that average uniques for most blogs is around 300-400/day. I get 1500 or thereabouts, with occasional spikes up to as much as 3500-4000 if I get Insta-, Corner-, or Den Beste-lanched, which happens very seldom indeed for me. Not bragging (or complaining, for that matter) here, mind you; I get the impression from e-mails and such that maybe people think my site is more popular than it really is, which is kind of puzzling. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been around a pretty good while in relative blog-years. Doesn’t matter at all in the end anyway; I was doing this when I was getting 20 uniques a day, and if I drop back to that, I’ll keep right on doing it just the same. The nice thing is, I’ve had many e-mails from people saying that if I link ’em, it’s good for a whole bunch of hits, which I feel good about since it allows me to direct a decent number of people’s attention to places I feel deserve it. And that’s what it’s all about in the end, I think.
I’ve been blogging for three years, but you’re already beating me by an order of magnitude in hits. Then again, you’re also beating me by an order of magnitude in quality of posts, so maybe your stats are right where they should be.
You’re doing well. Very well. So well, really, that you almost shouldn’t be wondering out loud how well you’re doing.
Seriously. Very few blogs your age have anything like this much traffic.
Our blog is about four months old — there are some older entries, but we only really got going in September — and we have an average of about 50-60 uniques, and we’re a Flippery Fish with something like 8 Ecosystem links.
Eyeballing the blogosphere, and trying to be objective about how “good” our blog is, I think we ought to be either an amphibian or a reptile, with daily uniques in… oh, maybe the low hundreds? Or perhaps I’m overestimating the number of people interested in Romania and Serbia. But I don’t think we’ve reached our equilibrium point yet, and it’ll take a while for us to get there.
To give another data point: consider The Head Heeb. It’s an excellent blog that’s been around for just over a year, and it’s now a Large Mammal (#217 in the Ecosystem — you guys are #700 or so, and I’m around #3,000.) But it had to slowly climb up to that status; I remember when that blog hit Marsupial, and it was well past the six month point.
You guys got jump started by being a spinoff from tacitus, of course. Which is great. I don’t think the spinoff effect inflated you; I do think it let you jump right over that months-long “ramp up” period. Good stuff like Katherine’s posts on the Arar case should now carry you further on and up.
Doug M.