Blog Report: Blogosphere Grading, Revisited

Back in February, I wrote a brief article talking about how the local internet-based media in the area stack up when compared to one another. I compared a handful of local sites — including the Spark — to get at least a thumbnail sketch of what kind of readership metrics the local blogosphere had at the time.

Today, I thought I’d briefly revisit the topic. As in the previous article, I’ll be comparing the Spark, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal‘s GoUpstate.com, the Spartanburg Journal‘s related website JournalWatchdog.com (technically, they cover the whole of the Upstate area) and a popular local blog, The Conservatist. (Last time, I used Seeding Spartanburg for the popular local blog, but now that the blog’s author, Tammy Stokes, is writing for the Spark, it’s probably a good idea to talk about a blog with with we have no formal connection.)

We’ll be using several different sites that measure different sorts of things, from inter-blog influence and reputation to hard traffic. Where possible, I’ll try to add some context for what these numbers actually mean as well. Let’s start.

Technorati.com

Technorati.com is the closest thing the internet has to a universally accepting blog-rating service, being one of the first such groups in the blogosphere as a whole. Their rankings are based on both total web traffic (out of the well-over 100 million blogs the site tracks), and on “Authority,” which is the number of blogs (not links) that refer to the site in question. It’s a good way of seeing how well-connected a blog is to the rest of the blogging community.

1. Spartanburg Spark: Rank: Rank: 288,827; Authority: 13 (A slight move up from last time, when the rank was 612,601 and the authority was a mere 9. According to Technorati, the Spark is rapidly edging towards being in the top quarter-million blogs in the world. I guess that’s something.)

2. The Conservatist: Rank: 335,848; Authority: 11 (Not bad at all. The Conservatist actually ranks much higher than the Spark did in February, and isn’t very far off from our current numbers.)

3. GoUpstate.com: Rank: N/A; Authority: N/A (GoUpstate.com doesn’t have a Technorati listing, although several of their stories show up in other blogs. Given the number of sites that regularly link to SH-J stories, however I’d imagine that if they did actually have a listing, their rank would be at the top of the list.)

4. JournalWatchdog: Rank: N/A; Authority: N/A (Just like the last time, JournalWatchdog isn’t registered with Technorati, and has no ranking. Unlike GoUpstate.com, however, I don’t think their rating would be particularly high, as their website is relatively new.)

Alexia.com

Although the site can chart several relevant metrics, Alexa.com is really only useful for our purposes for measuring a single aspect of a website: Traffic. It’s generally fairly reliable — more-or-less matching my own in-house metrics software — and is fairly useful for tracking blog traffic growth. The numbers below represent the average daily traffic rank — that is, how they stack up against the other sites Alexia tracks — for the last three months.

1. GoUpstate.com: Rank: 56,966 (A slight improvement since February’s 57,442th place. Stability is to be expected with a mainstream news site, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing. One reason for the slight growth might be that South Carolina in general has been getting a lot of attention thanks to Gov. Sanford’s recent hijinks.)

2. Spartanburg Spark: Rank: 1,187,125 (We didn’t even crack the top million? This is an outrage! But it’s also an improvement. In February, the Spark was ranked as the 2,423,227th most trafficked site on the internet. We’re getting there.)

3. JournalWatchdog: Rank: 1,763,883 (Coming up from behind is the dark horse, JournalWatchdog, which has skyrocketed up from 3,228,973th place. It’s an impressive gain.)

4. The Conservatist: Rank: 4,798,216 (Yikes! Not a terribly strong showing here, and a strange contrast to the Technorati ranking. What this means is that it’s probably other bloggers that are reading and linking to The Conservatist, rather than casual readers. Alexia also says that in the last three months the site has fallen some 628,430 places.)

WebsiteOutlook.com

Next, we have WebsiteOutlook.com, one of many “value”-determining engines on the internet that turn metrics into dollar values. I picked this one because it uses metrics that usually land the value in the ballpark the sites are generally valued at by investors. It’s not precise, but at least it’s a fair means of comparing the sites in terms of dollars and cents. While I can’t speak for the other sites, I can say that the fundamental traffic stats for the Spark are certainly within the range I’m used to seeing on my own analytics reports, so there’s reason to think it’s at least somewhat accurate.

1. GoUpstate.com: Estimated Worth: $44077.40 (Based on a daily traffic of 19309 pageviews valued at $60.38 dollars per day in ad revenue. While this is by far the most valuable site profiled, its growth is also the least dramatic, being worth some $39383.50. in February. Out of all the sites, however, it’s the only one that generates anything close to real income, which shouldn’t be surprising given the resources the company has to work with.)

2. Spartanburg Spark: Estimated Worth: $3387.20 (Based on a daily traffic of 968 pageviews valued at $4.64 dollars per day in ad revenue. This is moderate growth from February, when the site was valued at a humble $1606.)

3. JournalWatchdog: Estimated Worth: $2628 (Based on a daily traffic of 623 pageviews valued at $3.60 dollars per day in ad revenue. This is significant growth from February, when the site was valued at a mere $817.60.)

4. The Conservatist: Estimated Worth: $1963.70 (Based on a daily traffic of 229 pageviews valued at $2.69 dollars per day in ad revenue.)

Grader.com

Since we’ve looked at how these sites stack up with each other in terms of inter-blog credibility, traffic and dollar value, it’s only right that we take a look at how well they compare structurally as well. Which is what Grader.com does, at least in theory. The measurements reflect how well-put together the sites are by contemporary internet standards. While this does provide a fair means of comparison, I personally find Grader’s standards to be kind of shallow, putting high value on things like the number of Digg.com submissions a site has, meaning that one could easily skew the results. The ratings are from 1 (lowest) to 100.

1. GoUpstate.com: Grade: 98.1 (Various technical quibbles, but otherwise a very good rank from Grader, and a marked improvement from February, when the site scored a 91.)

2. Spartanburg Spark: Grade: 97.7 (A big improvement from February’s 80. Strangely, I took exactly none of Grader’s suggestions for how to improve the Spark’s rating, yet there’s a 17-plus point jump. It does cast some doubt on their methodology.)

3. The Conservatist: Grade: 90 (No data from last time, of course, but Grader has very little negative to say about the site. The meta keywords and images all indicate a well-crafted design.)

4. JournalWatchdog: Grade: 89 (A big gain from the previous grade of 70, although there’s no clear reason why this would happen. Most of the Grader-generated concerns from last time seem to be unchanged.)

So, what have we learned from this exercise? Quite a lot, actually.

Take the biggest, best-funded, most-read site we’ve looked at, GoUpstate.com. They got great rankings everywhere except for Technorati, and that was only because they didn’t register the site with them. Yet, according to the estimates, that site is barely making enough to pay the salary of one reporter, and that’s before hosting costs.

We’ve also seen that there’s a clear trend of smaller sites like the Spark and the JournalWatchdog growing at a fast clip, while the behemoth that is GoUpstate.com seems to be more-or-less stagnant in terms of growth. That’s important, because as bigger papers shed their staff to try to remain profitable, the actual growth in journalism in general is coming from small start-up companies with few employees (or none, in our case) and very low overhead.

We’ve also seen that a relatively influential local political site, The Conservatist, has a great reputation among bloggers on Technorati, yet has comparitively little actual traffic, which limits its cash value.

Of course, as I pointed out last time, you really can’t take this stuff all that seriously. These are best-guesses based solely on publicly available data, and they only reflect part of the picture. But once can certainly infer trends, particularly if tracked over time.

Here’s where the fun starts. If you’re a blogger, run your site through these same engines and tell us what you find.