Derryn Hinch’s web traffic, #dickileaks and the Saints
Apologies to the Saints. They are mentioned in this post as Hinch has been talking about them and Hinch’s traffic relates to the controversy related to them. And, Google Analytics wise, I want to quickly filter my traffic related to #dickileaks and putting Saints in the URL is an easy way to do that.
Derryn Hinch claimed he was getting a two million hits. I want to explore that number some more, especially in light of my last post. What’s the real total for Derryn Hinch’s traffic? I’d estimate he is probably close to 23,000 page views a month if your baseline for measuring is Google Analytics, probably normally closer to 30,000 visitors a month if we’re being generous. Let me explore how I got to that number.
This is Ozziesport.com on Quarkbase. What tools do I have installed that Quarkbase picks up? QuantCast (Traffic Monitoring), wordpress (Blog), Google Analytics (Traffic Monitoring), StatCounter (Traffic Monitoring), Apache/1.3.41 (Webserver), WordPress (Traffic Monitoring). This is hinch.net on Quarkbase. His tools? Apache/2.2.3 (Webserver). This is important. It tells me that whatever numbers that Hinch is using is not an industry standard one. The industry standard is Google Analytics. (I’ve talked to three different companies about acquiring sites I own. They always want to see that site. nothing else.) Derryn doesn’t have it installed. His method of counting is server side. Server side stats are not reliable and not used by the industry. Why? Server generated statistics include Google bot access, pingback spam, all pages accessed internally, other bots accessing the site, Google Adsense access, etc. This means that numbers are highly inflated. I’ll give you a clear example of this.
That chart is the traffic as measured by Awstats, a server side method of tracking my traffic. My raw stats say I got 19,254 visits, 67987 page views, 261998 page views, 423240 hits in December. That’s hugely impressive. Look ma! I got almost half a million hits! Yay! I can now sell my services for millions of dollars because I’m super popular and everyone in sports bows to the wisdom of my social media related data!
Er. Wait. No. Google Analytics tells me a completely different story…
Where I had 19,254 visits according to server data , I have 2,106. My server data inflates the number of visitors I have by almost 10. Given this, whatever numbers Hinch says he has? I’d automatically divide that number by ten in order to get a slightly more accurate number. If we’re using me as a benchmark, it makes Hinch’s server side look totally out of whack with the reality of how the industry measures traffic and it makes him less than credible when citing his own numbers.
Moving on. Let’s look at Compete. Compete is one of three free public tools for analyzing web traffic. Like Alexa, it requires a toolbar install to count. Unlike Alexa, it only counts USA based traffic. Hinch’s page. Ozziesport’s page. In October, Hinch saw 1,219 USA visitors. That was his peak month of the months available. The next month he had 111 visits. My peak month was January 2010, where I saw 2,903 US visitors. In November, I saw 182 visits to my site. According to Compete, I had more interest from Americans than Hinch. The Saints had 183 USA visitors in November. Their peak month saw 2,285 USA visitors. The AFL saw a peak of 34,997 in September and 8,367 visitors in November. Hinch’s numbers at their highest don’t compete with my own numbers and they don’t compete with the Saints. They definitely don’t compete with the AFL. If Hinch’s site was indeed that popular, he’d be getting a lot of USA traffic of a measurable kind. And no, he’s not.
I’ve already looked at Hinch on Alexa and when you put his numbers against what you know of mine from the Google Analytics, you’re probably looking at comparable levels of traffic between the two of us. If Hinch was getting millions of views, I’d expect his numbers to be closer to that of the AFL, who I have reason to suspect get that amount of traffic. I remember hearing something about GWS Giant’s traffic and I can’t recall the exact numbers involved… but their team name , color and logo announcement resulted in at least 25,000 visits in the first hour after that was done. The number be a bit higher, closer to 40,000 visits. I think they were close to a quarter million visits in the next two days after… but I can’t recall exactly. This event moved their site up from zero ranking on Alexa Australia on November 18 to 22,839 by December 22. The view times that I’ve visited Derryn’s site and noted his Alexa ranking? I didn’t see those wild movements Australian rankings that indicate a huge surge in traffic.
If he was getting a million real human page visits, I sure as hell would expect him to crack the top 100,000 sites world wide on Alexa. I know that Fan History, another site I run, made it into the top 100,000 around the time that we were getting 45,000 unique visitors according to Google Analytics. So yeah, I suspect that Hinch had a bump in traffic. If I was being extremely generous, based on the above chart comparing him to the GWSGiants.com.au, I’d say he got 100,000 page views. That’s still ten times less than a million.
The last free tool for looking at web traffic is Quantcast. Quantcast tracks traffic using websites that install their cookies. For sites not “quantified,” the site makes estimates based on sites people visit before and after they visit a quantified site. Hinch isn’t quantified but OzzieSport and Fan History are. I don’t know many Australian sites that are quantified. The AFL isn’t. Still, Quantcast estimates 3,600 US visitors a month, 15,900 global visitors a month. These numbers are undoubtedly low because again, Australian sites that are quantified and might link the AFL are small. Still, The Age estimates it gets 372,000 world visitors a month to their site. If Hinch is getting as many visits as he’s implying, he should be in the ballpark of our non-quantified Australian sites that we know probably get near the traffic that Hinch alleged, he be there. Quantcast says his traffic is so small that it isn’t measurable. Yeah, their numbers date to November… but I would be willing to bet people that when those numbers do update, they don’t put Hinch close to the AFL or The Age, sites that he should be better than if he actually has 2 million hits. Hinch’s low numbers put him right up there with my University department and other low traffic, low international profile Australian media sites like his own radio station. (But at least his radio station gets a lot more visitors than he does on Compete.) Hinch is not getting the traffic of The Age or the AFL. Given what I know about traffic to unquantified sites, I think 30,000 visitors sounds about fair for what he’s getting.
Given that the Quantcast and Compete numbers are a bit dated, I’m willing to be flexible. The disconnect between server statistics and Google Analytics? I’m not willing to be flexible there. His numbers put his traffic at four times mine. 261998 total page views on server/3,079 page views on Google Analytics = 85 times the difference. 2,000,000 / 85 = 23,529 probably realistic Google Analytics correction for page views for Hinch.
