It must be milestone week. First, 5000 posts for The Inquisitr, now 10 million page views. We snuck past the 10m mark some time on March 23 US time, or morning March 24 AEDT.

The funny stat: if we take a line from Oct 5 (US time) our 5th month anniversary, we’ve done 9 million pages views since then. From Dec 5, we’ve done 7.4 million. Goes to prove the point: it takes 6-9 months for a blog to establish itself one way or another.

Hopefully for our first full year, May 5, we’ll come in at around 12.5 million page views.

I should add: ignore the drop at the end of the chart, for some reason the total view doesn’t offer a full count for the current day and it is suppose to go up, not down.

The comment count is a little strange. Disqus 17,300 odd, and I don’t think there was 7000 in the time before Disqus and after.

The 5000 came Friday US time (March 20). So 5,000 posts in 319 days at an average of 15.7 posts a day.

We get a really good run on GNews with Australian stories, but I don’t know how to monetize Australian news, well to the point where we can afford a sales team to make it worth while. The bad side is that while we get good treatment on Australian stories, GNews labels The Inquisitr as “The Inquisitr, Australia” lots of times, which might limit us a bit.

The option is that we go for VC, but well…at least one VC I’ve met wasn’t all that friendly + the real value proposition is US news, tech, odd etc. We even had a rough interested to buy offer two weeks ago. Hard for me because I’d like to do more local content, but ultimately I need to pay bills.

Just a short(ish) note to anyone who is following our numbers at the moment.

Over the weekend (Friday US time to be precise) I upgraded to WP 2.7.1 and we started having problems with our stats.

At first, I thought that OMG our unique visitor count was crashing. Indeed, if you look at the data, you’d conclude the same thing. Our unique total dived, and yet our pages per visitor number doubled. Indeed, we’d normally do roughly 1.5-1.8 pages per visit (a recent high was 2.4). Instead, we’re doing 3.0-3.3 at the moment. I’d love to believe that this is true, but it isn’t.

The story is that something with Disqus and Facebook has caused the referral data to go haywire. I’ve been working with Daniel Ha at Disqus to sort it, although at the time of writing it’s still borked. Also thx to the team at Clicky for getting involved.

Basically, our unique data is flawed, but our page view data is good. How I know this? The ad count has been in line with the page view data from Clicky and Google Analytics.

My very real concern is that we’re heading south in Quantcast at the moment, and the page views don’t match that line. The primary line in Quantcast is visitors, not pages views. It also sucks from a personal view point because I can’t accurately track live stats at the moment: half of our referrals show up as Disqus or Facebook Connect.

We did experience our usual beginning of the month slump…without fail the last 6 months, we start slow, but it’s not nearly as bad as some public stats show. For example, the US Monday March 9 at the time of writing was just shy of 100k page views (I hope it slips over 100k for the full day). That’s our biggest day since Feb 12.

Hopefully fixed soon.

Pageviews: 2,315,920 (new monthly record)

Traffic profile: largest post at 15.2% of views (and a bloody lot of comments).

Finances: the ad market is still bleeding.

Our overall monthly return was down 2.1% from January despite a 27% jump in traffic. By my calculations, we are off 23% on what we should have achieved in February based on January’s return.

Our profit is up somewhat this month due to putting off one writer. The profit though is up less than the cost of that writer. The weakening AUD helps a little bit as well (all my calculations above are in USD) as the net return has a slightly higher end result due to currency conversion, although all our costs are in USD, so this only works in our favor with profit.

Going forward we’ve done everything we can to run a lean ship. Our cost base is down, and despite being down a writer the traffic went up. However there are risks ahead. We’ll likely do less traffic this month (we tend to go on two month cycles), and a similar drop in advertising rates will hurt. The only question now is when will the online ad market bottom, and how much further will it fall.

Technorati Rank: 252. It actually went backwards this month by a small amount, although has been all over the place (even 133 briefly for one day, and a high of 305.

Meg updated her Top 100 Australian blogs, the best and fairest top Australian blog list (we can’t even get added to some of the others, go figure) Australia Day. Here’s the result

Win.

It doesn’t pay the bills I might add, but to be up there after just short of 9 months with the Allure Media blogs and Darren Rowse is pretty cool.

Also thx to Meg for doing the list. I understand how hard it is to do, having tried the top 20 manually a couple of times. Meg: donation button or advertising ops, contact me.

Interesting that people perceive The Inquisitr for its celebrity content. Scoble mentioned it on FriendFeed, but I know it’s a common perception.

Let me say that I really don’t have a lot of issues with the perception. We love our mix, I love not having to write wall to wall serious tech posts every day, and more importantly, its working. We’ll go just shy of 2m page views this month, and we need 320k in the last four days of the month to do it.

As I noted on another FriendFeed thread recently, we’re becoming more like a newspaper site. The only thing really holding us back expanding into more spaces (and we have a list of spaces we’d like to enter) is money…which is essentially people and time.

Here’s the traffic split I provided to someone recently

The split based on the top 100 posts month to today (as at Dec 18)

Odd/ Funny 62% Celeb 11%, General News 11%, Tech 8%, TV 3% Media 2% Other 2%

Excluding the top 3 posts (which were all 50k and above)

51% odd/ funny, Celeb 14%, news 13%, Tech 11%, TV 5%, media 3% other 3%

Estimate for all traffic:

40% odd/ funny, Celeb 10%, news 5%, Tech 25%, TV 5%, media 10% other 5%.

We get much better long tail traffic month to month on tech + media, and there is 2-3x more posts in tech than in other categories. News is usually only topical to time, and celeb stuff usually doesn’t wag the tail much either.