CSotD: Numbers, sticky and otherwise
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Funny you should mention it, Hilary.
As a sort of a niche blog just entering its third year, I don't expect huge numbers, though I'd love to get up into four figures a day, simply because there are revenue potentials when you hit a certain level of readership.
You all wouldn't mind seeing a picture of a cute girl from your hometown who made $58,000 a month sitting at home in cut-off jeans and a little white top, would you? Or learning why you should never, ever eat a banana?
I knew you wouldn't.
As it is, daily visits are in three figures, and not high in them, which is okay with me. Back when I was selling TV time, I would try to explain why the value of a spot on "Meet the Press" should be judged by who was watching rather than by raw numbers, and by what you were attempting to sell, especially since the modest ratings made the spots quite a bit cheaper.
For a golf shop, a luxury car dealer or an insurance agent, it was a much better buy than M*A*S*H reruns, whatever the comparative ratings.
They didn't get it, but I did, and I still do. So I'm okay with 10 out of 10 billion.
Especially after this blog got a hot mention on Reddit a couple of days ago, and suddenly I had, oh, 30 times my normal traffic. Which would be great if it were sustained, because then I could get big bucks for telling you to never eat a banana.
But what I got was about 36 hours of heavy clicks that have now subsided. Sic transit, baby.
It's possible that I will have picked up a handful of new readers, and that's delightful. Yesterday, I cited a previous posting about the New England Webcomics Weekend, and, back when that first appeared, I had a sudden spike that came and went but did add to my average over the long term as some of those folks decided to stick around.
Welcome, Reddit fans! And thanks to whoever provided the link!
However, looking at the stats through two different counters, it appears that the vast, vast majority of these visitors clicked on the link to see what it was referencing and then hit return and probably clicked on the next one to see what it was referencing.
The average time-on-site has barely been enough to read the strip, much less peruse the commentary, and hits to other pages were not noticeably higher, so that most of these visitors, if they did stick around to read, only read the referenced page and didn't do any traveling within the site.
The point is not to say it was a bad thing. While I'm not prepared to defend the idea that "there's no such thing as bad publicity," there's certainly nothing bad about having a ton of new visitors.
But you have to look at events like this, and the influx from the NEWW coverage, as advertising.
Back in the days when I knew such things, the conversion rate for direct mail ads was about two percent. If, in the coming weeks, I find that two percent of these visitors have decided to stick around, it will nearly double my current numbers.
And they would be "Meet the Press" level people.
Which means I would have to set things up so I'd get paid for just showing them the Banana of Doom, because they wouldn't be dumb enough to actually click on it.
In other news:
Tony Auth is the latest political cartoonist to accept a buyout and leave the newsroom, in this case, the Philadelphia Inquirer.
He is adamant that he was not pressured to leave, and, having just discussed the whole issue of newspaper buyouts, I'm not going to doubt his word. I'll bet you get a pretty good sackful of quarters when you offer your employer a chance to cut loose a 30-plus-year veteran.
The only thing that annoyed me was the dumb suit who said, “You don’t replace somebody like that, you don’t replace a legend.”
Yeah, well, Peyton Manning was a legend, too, but I don't think the Colts are going to field a 10-man offense in September.
But I'm not going to say much more because Michael Cavna has it totally covered over at his blog. (which will now receive a sudden, mysterious influx of "Meet The Press" quality readers.)
And also:
The plot over at Retail is thickening faster than Marla's waistline. If Norm Feuti starts quoting Langston Hughes about dreams deferred, things might get out of hand, but, in the meantime, well, it's an interesting alternative to having the baby and then opening your own little shop, isn't it, Marla?
And this on-going long-term storyline is an interesting alternative to pie-in-the-face gag strips.
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