The truth about traffic on the Internet
Ahh, the Guardian got into a little dirty truth about traffic on TechMeme: there isn't many people there. — Every time I get on TechMeme I get 500 to 3,000 visits. That matches what the Guardian and what Nick Carr are seeing.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Guardian's argument that Techmeme's influence is overestimated landed yesterday, and Robert Scobleizer is now supplying the first-party numbers behind it: each of his TechMeme appearances sends him 500 to 3,000 visits, figures he says match what the Guardian and Nick Carr are seeing independently.
The gap matters because the blogosphere's status hierarchies were built on links, not readership — the Technorati 100 ranked blogs by inbound links back in March 2007 — so a site can sit at the top of every aggregator and still move only a few thousand visitors per placement.
First-order effects
- Bloggers like Scobleizer and Nick Carr now have public numbers showing a TechMeme headline placement is worth hundreds to low thousands of visits, not the audience surge its prominence implies.
Second-order effects
- If prominent bloggers stop treating TechMeme placement as a traffic prize, PR pitches and ad pricing keyed to aggregator visibility lose part of their justification, and pressure shifts toward whoever can show real referral volume.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to influence and reach decoupling in tech media: gatekeepers like TechMeme hold agenda-setting power over a small elite readership even when their raw traffic contribution is modest, which makes link-based authority metrics an increasingly unreliable proxy for audience.
The trend: Tech-media influence in 2007 is being priced by links and elite attention rather than measurable traffic, exposing a widening gap between aggregator prominence and actual audience delivered.