Stat Porn and Stat Value

James Higham has an interesting post on his Nourishing Obscurity blog about how blogging works and the importance of linking to fellow bloggers in a meaningful way in order to increase reader numbers (hey James I just linked to you in a meaningful way :-) ).

I suppose that if I had a million unique visitors every day that I would post statporn each month in the way that Mr Dale and others do. The 200 or so daily readers of this blog would be too embarrassing to post regular stats on.

I was going to post a comment on James' post (commenting on fellow bloggers' posts is also a meaningful way to interact), but I was told that my post was unacceptable because:

Your thoughts are eagerly sought but please keep to the issue rather than against the commenter you disagree with. It's the only rule in comments here.

I hope that my comment was "to the issue" and didn't slag off another person's contribution!

However the point that I was trying to make was related to this part of the post:

4. Some wiser heads than mine once told me not to worry about stats because firstly, most people read you on feeds anyway and that never registers. Secondly, the google searches will progressively make up a higher percentage of your stats as you go along [they're the bulk of mine] and as your topics of interest are more free-ranging.

And this is my reaction:

I have a blog stats tracker from Ice-rocket, but I don't look at the stats that often.

I'm not sure that the numbers of people who read my musings is as important as the "quality" of readers (I hope that this doesn't sound too snobby).

The biggest group of readers of my blogs (about 30%) are people who have found the posts through Google. One out of five Google searches are for the names of my blogs - which is good. Another one in five are searches for topics on which I have written, also good; but 3 out of 5 are searches for, sometimes laughable, search strings:

dieting doom and gloom of winter poems
Why do wales have the biggest dick?*
Wankers Anonymous
Farting and Barclays Bank

I don't think that the hundreds of people who find my blogs every week, from such searches are worth the stats that they create. The tens of regular readers who read my posts because they are interested in my musings are of much higher "value" to me than those who come to my blog from silly searches.

I was told by one blogger, I can't remember who (it might have been Jeff at SNP tactical voting - I apologise if it wasn't) if you really want a political point to be read by thousands of people, make your point and end your post with Angelina Jole / Kiley Minogue / Ioan Gruffudd / any other star naked!


* I think that this searcher was looking for info about Whales rather than Wales, but it is still an odd question to ask!