duncanriley.com

Category: Web 2.0

  • Some days I wish there was a way we could do more Australian news

    melbourne earthquake - Google News

    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.

  • The numbers recession we’re not having

    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.

  • Inquisitr February 2009: and still the ad market bleeds

    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.

  • Some Australian PR Reps don’t get blogs

    To start on a positive note, I’ve had a uptick lately of Australian PR pitches. Some are half reasonable, although like all the stuff that comes in, we can’t run it all, even if we wanted to. The Inquisitr doesn’t do a huge amount of Australian related content, although as our Australian traffic increases it does get a little tempting to do more Australian posts…within moderation of the broader mix.

    But I digress. Got pitched last month to promote a new Australian banking product. They wanted to give me a $10 account in return for a post.

    Now besides the paid for post argument which can be left for another day, apparently $10 in the eyes of that PR firm at least is fair game for a blog with 1.5-2.5 million page views a month.

    It’s hard to compare one site to another, but I know from some of the media I’ve received previously that WAToday, the Fairfax WA portal did 341,000 uniques in July 2008 (I don’t have later figures). No idea what their page view figure is, but today we’re in a similar range on Alexa at least (not the best source I know) to what that site is doing, and we have more uniques.

    Question is: would the same PR agency offer $10 for a post/ article on a Fairfax property?

    Obviously the answer is no, and one would presume that they’d be buying display advertising for the product instead of trying to buy a post….well, you’d hope so.

    So why treat all blogs and bloggers as if they were backyard operations with small traffic?

    Besides, according to News.com.au, I personally account for 5-6% of all online contracting for the entire country 😉

    American PR reps are a lot smarter these days, although I do remember the time years ago when they weren’t. Not all the Australian PR industry is clueless, but I get this feeling that some have only just woken up to blogs as an outlet for news, and are treating bloggers as a cheap way to get exposure without showing the least bit of respect.

  • Age shall not weary them, nor the Google News forget

    Just for a change, I’ll bag someone other than the mainstream media.

    Google News.

    Its Valentines Day, Feb 14. 11:15am in the morning at I’m typing this.

    And what is Google News showing in its latest Victoria news section? (hint, look at the dates of the stories)

    Google News

  • Online ad spending up in Australia?

    Paidcontent reports on a PCW report that suggests at least until the end of the last year, online ad spend in Australia continued to head north.

    Notably off a crappy base, and they only polled the “top 1000 sites” what ever that means. Still, wins a win.

  • TwitterCounter

    I must have been living in a cave, or just forgotten, but TwitterCounter tracks your Twitter followers (via Ross Hill on FF)

    TwitterCounter Stats: We Track & Analyze @duncanriley

    Conclusion from my stats: Twitter works best if you be yourself. I quite often share inane things, weather, finance, stuff I find, and sometimes what ever pops into my head, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My thx to all those following: you’re following because you either like me, or like what I have to say, not some social media friendly picture of what I should pretend to me. Hint to some others: you’re trying to hard 😉

  • Win

    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

    Top 100 Australian Blogs Index | Dipping into the Blogpond

    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.

  • Bleg: Please browser makers, show a where the audio is coming from button

    I’ll admit it: I’m a tab fiend. I switched away from IE6 to Firefox all those years ago (when I was still a Windows user) for tabs. Tabs were, and still are the miracle of the modern internet. They allow you to open content and come back to it later.

    In my case, that’s opening content in Google Reader that I might want to read in full later, or even post about. On a busy day, that can be as high as 40-50 tabs…which is also why I do my reading in Safari today, even if I do my posting and stats work in Firefox, Safari is more stable.

    But I digress. The problem I have today is with audio. Sometimes I’ll open a tab (and they’re opened in the background, not upfront) and it will play music. Sometimes which ones are obvious, for example with auto-playing video. But many other times it’s not so obvious, and if you have dozens of tabs open, it’s hard to identify where the audio is coming from, if you can at all.

    Numerous times lately I’ve just had to turn off sound because I couldn’t find the source, which is where browser makers come in. Please, please add a tab, or icon, or something to identify the source of audio on webpages. It’s all I ask, honestly (well aside from FF stability).

  • Inquisitr comes in at 7th on Australian Startup Index

    TechNation Australia ?Ǭª Blog Archive ?Ǭª Australian Startup Index - Jan 09

    The definition is probably a little fluid, but we get included with sites that may be arguably less deserving. Very nice though. The full index here.

    BTW, anyone know what’s happening with the top 100 Australian blogs index? Meg hasn’t updated since November. I in part understand why: manually calculating the totals must be a complete bitch, but Meg has just completely stopped blogging as well.

    One commitment though: if she isn’t back soon, I’ll give it a shot. Probably need half a day to do it, but it’s an index I value.