A month or so ago, I wrote a blog post titled "Most Expensive Wi-Fi Ever?" about the cost of internet services at a Toronto-area convention centre.
I submitted the post to StumbleUpon, BoingBoing, TechDirt and Reddit, as I thought all would be places where readers might be interested in this type of insane mark-up. After my colleague Ian pointed out that Seth Godin had linked to me, I dug into Google Analytics to see how much traffic that ended up driving to my post.
As a result, BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow blogged about it on September 22nd, resulting in 1,141 hits to my post.
Mike Masnick at TechDirt wrote about my post on October 25, but didn't link directly to me (I don't mind).
Seth Godin mentioned my post in a recent post he wrote, driving another 678 views.
Reddit drove a measly 61 views.
And Google Analytics reports that StumbleUpon drove 2,437 views of the webpage (even though StumbleUpon itself only reports driving 35 users to the page).
There were also an additional 2,762 views to the post that Google Analytics identified as coming from (direct). While I obviously can't confirm where these are coming from, I have a feeling they're probably spread out across the different sources (my other colleague Kevin Mchugh sent me this link that might help explain that (direct) traffic)
So what does all this mean?
By itself, not much. Views or hits aren't everything these days. A kind word from an online influencer is probably worth a lot more than a link in the long run, thought it might be more difficult to measure.
There is also probably a lot of digging I can do into how long visitors from the different sources stuck around, and whether they checked out anything else on my site. Visitors from one source, though fewer, might end up being more 'valuable' (in this sense, sticking around as long-term readers).
What do you think about this data?
-Parker