June
19
2006
I thought I would start off this analysis by comparing my blog traffic to Xavier Casanova’s theory of Readership Growth:
The basic cycle goes like this:
(1) Seeding. You start a blog, write 8 or 10 interesting posts, and advertise your blog as much as possible (link on your email signature/forums/etc). Soon enough, another blogger will write about you or point to you (blogroll, etc).(2) Exponential growth. After reaching some critical mass of readers, readership growth accelerates all of the sudden – typically because a popular
blogger has written about you, or there is a press article pointing to your site.(3) Organic growth. Your base keeps growing but it’s slooooowww. You’re incapable to sustaining the growth rates you had in phase 2.
So let me caviat this by saying that I am looking at page views and not readers – I don’t have a sufficient sample of readers via Feedburner or Bloglines to make the direct comparison but I think that page views are an acceptable stand-in in this case.
At right, is a chart of page views to this blog during its first one hundred days. You’ll notice that it has both daily tallies as well as a cumulative line. I’ve also included what I think are key events. In most cases, these are when “Sneezers” pick me up and spread the word. Although please note that Microsoft’s acquisition of Deep Metrix caused a spike in traffic to this blog (as it did to most blogs in the web analytics community) around May 6. In addition to the actual stats (daily and cumulative) I’ve added a best fit curve (4th order polynomial) which besides having a great correalation to the actual data, resembles Xavier’s theoretical chart above quite closely.
So, following Xavier’s theory, it looks as though Instant Cognition was in the ‘Seeding’ phase from March 7, 2006 through about April 18, 2006. On or about April 19, this blog entered it’s first ‘Exponential’ growth phase (a low exponent to be sure) that was kicked off by my attendance (and possibly my presentation) at Emetrics. Then, soon after Jeremiah Owyang (a blogging and podcasting heavy) added me to his blog roll and Avinash Kaushik started blogging my exponential growth phase comes to an end and I am now in the ‘Organic Growth’ phase until I get picked up by a new community.
For those who are interested, here are the linear slopes for each phase:
Phase I: 16.21
Phase II: 34.67 (more than double Phase I)
Phase III: 22.43
A couple of things that stand out to me here.
- If you walk along the cumulative line, you see what I consider to be micro traffic cycles. Consider for instance, April 19 through April 22 (Emetrics), in fine, this spike event looks just like the theoretical pattern posited by Xavier. The micro cycle repeats itself between May 15 through May 19 and again from May 28 – June 6 — and these are just a few examples.
- Secondly, observation of the daily page views bar chart bears out the growth trend just by eyeballing the density of high-traffic days during each phase. In phase I there is a paucity of high volume days while in Phase II there are many more and then the high volume days settle back in phase III, they are not as few as in Phase I and the low volume days are at a higher average than before so it looks like Phase II had a positive impact on phase III (otherwise the last phase would look a lot more like the first one).
So, what have I learned from this first part of the analysis?
- Well, if Xavier is right, I’ve got a fairly typical blog and am at least doing some things right. We’ll get into more detail later, but for the most part, I’ve picked up the ‘right’ Sneezers: Eric Peterson, Robbin Steif, Avinash Kaushik and Jeremiah Owyang to name a few.
- Also, it’s hard to get out of your own way. At work I’m dealing with numbers that are many orders of magnitude larger. Climbing down off that mountain to look at my blog traffic is tough.
- Oh! And Xavier’s a really bright guy. Ok, I already knew that (and so did all of you probably) but he is being especially kind by letting me reproduce his charts and theory here and by offering up any other data or help I might need as I go down this 100 days path.
Sources:
Special thanks to Xavier Casanova of Perenety for letting me use his Blog Theory and charts for this comparison.
Clint: Congratulations on the 100 days accomplishment. Your analysis is very insightful, and perhaps it is to be expected that the graph is so pretty and chock full of insights. I wonder if there is one thing missing from this graph, the correlation with the number of posts? It can’t just be that people show up when someone “sneezes” I am sure there is a correlation with the quantity or quality of posts. The more you post (quantity or quality) the more people like me get hooked. Of course the “sneezing” helps but just that can’t explain your excellent growth trend.
What do you think?
Congratulations again.
-Avinash.
Avinash – you are (not surprisingly) absolutely correct AND anticipating another part of the analysis.
In a future post, we’ll dig down and look at the relationship between posting and reading (production and consumption).
Clint: Congrats on your first 100 days! No surprise to see such transparency from you, but it’s extremely cool to get an opportunity to look at this direct application of theory to real results. Keep it up!
Lisa