Our Long Tail
posted by Dave Hoffman
Inspired by this slate article on the Long Tail phenomena, I decided to dig into our most recent visitors as tracked by Sitemeter. The resulting image, revealing our tail, is to the left.
As you can see, our most recent 535 visits follow a pretty classic pattern. The average post was seen by 7 folks, but obviously the distribution was skewed. Of the 3840 total visits, 2452 (64%) came from our top ten posts, and 3212 (84%) came from our top one-hundred. Of the top ten posts I studied, four were published this month. Seven of the top twenty posts were recent additions to our product list.
Contrary to popular (and self-expressed) belief, only 9% of our visits came from a combination of our more notorious posts. It’s too tedious to figure out exactly what percentage of our hits came from visitors searching for law reviews and rankings, but it wasn’t higher than 10%
Indeed, 299 of our recent visits (8%) came from the steady, ant-like, accumulation of one visit wonders. Work of mine that I thought slipped under the waves long ago, like RateMyProfessors and Subverting Hierarchy, and The Gorilla Award for 2005, is still of interest to at least one person. Thanks, person!
I’m sure there are larger lessons here. Something about the value of blogs to users of Google, or the importance of navel gazing instead of writing about substantive legal topics. But, frankly, putting together this picture took half the night. Excel on the Mac and Firefox are a buggy combo.
August 15, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Posted in: Blogging
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