My thanks to the team as always, without whom this wouldn’t be possible. Now lets not mention the ads though: July=northern summer= not good, but we’re getting closer to the good ad months now. If we can keep the traffic up coming into Oct/ thanksgiving/ xmas…. 🙂
So our traffic has finally gone through a growth spurt, headed primarily by a big jump in pages per visitor after installing Facebook commenting (see graph above.)
But the jump isn’t reflected in any of our public stats, including Quantcast via direct tracking. Note that our internal stats are backed by GetClicky, GAnalytics and Technorati Media…that is, we know this isn’t a mistake.
What gives? I know there’s a focus on uniques with these services (and our uniques are fairly steady) but both views are page view views.
And in case your wondering why I love Mark Zuckerberg at the moment….
Just a short admin note for The Inquisitr: we’ve recently terminated one of our syndication deals. I won’t go into the details, however I wish the company involved future success, and although the product wasn’t working for us, I still like what this company does as a competitor to AP, so I’ll still be cheering a bit for them.
What that means is that in the last 2 weeks we’ve had a significant drop in posts on The Inquisitr. Roughly 7-10 posts a day. It means we’re not covering as much general news stuff as we were.
I’m not sure quite yet as to whether this is a good or bad thing. It’s less to read, but likewise it may also help our original content stand out some more.
It does mean though that we are short in some categories, particularly science and health (and we had to delete the old content from them as well per the termination of the deal.) I haven’t made the call yet, but we might fold science and health into a sub-tech category going forward vs remaining stand-alone.
Not ready to hire or expand again until we get out of the first quarter ad slump (there always seems to be one this time of year), so we’ll wait until at least mid April to review.
When Kim Heras moved the Top 100 Australian startups to Younoodle, we completely disappeared, not helped by the fact that we didn’t even have a Younoodle listing.
New year and finally we’re back in the Top 10.
There’s been lots of lulz following my reply to Media140 a couple of weeks back, but the best came from one person who claims that The Inquisitr is a scrapper site who copies and pastes content that isn’t our own.
Let me say up front that roughly 20-30% of our content (sometimes less) is most definitely copied and pasted.
But here’s the fact that is left off that allegation: we pay for that.
That is, we pay to syndicate content from AllHeadlineNews and Bang Showbiz.
Just like a standard newspaper pays to syndicate content from AAP, AFP, AP, Reuters or others.
Far from an issue that apparently calls The Inquisitr into some sort of doubt, those deals actually represent our maturity as an online news source, in that we happily pay to compliment our original content…just like Newspapers do.
Going forward, I also won’t rule out that we won’t sign more of these sorts of deals: it’s not as if they replace what we do in house (which drives most of the traffic), as opposed to compliment it (and particularly help us achieve most days 24/7 content.)
Naturally we’d love to bring on new writers, but likewise money is like a rollercoaster of late (not helped by the GFC): we have never booked a loss since December last year, but likewise some months are spectacular vs others.
The positive note is that going into December that November is on track to be our best month $ wise on record, be it not the best traffic month. Half time of year, half focus (particularly on tech.)
If some doubt me, ask our suppliers, or see our long standing text on the copyright page here
And not only because they’re selling more of our ads at late 🙂
Technorati Top 100: 50-75.
June 22 was a blip, but Technorati has sorted it out ever since, at least we’ve been steady for over a week. Quest to 100.
The good news before we start is that hopefully the worst of the US recession is over for us ad wise on the site. We’re still not doing anywhere near the fill or CPM rates we were getting in the last quarter of last year, but through a combination of improved traffic, improvements from our main ad provider, and a strong secondary set of ad providers we’ve leveled out a bit. Still no Caribbean holiday for me, but likewise I’m not having a heart attack at the end of each month (no, that comes when I try to pull money out and find the AUD has gone from 60c to 80c USD 🙂 )
We’ve floated in the 2-3m page view range now since earlier in the year, and although we were down slightly in June (2.55m from 2.7 May) we’re comfortable now…which means it’s time to push to the next level.
New writer
We’ve expanded our writing team to 4 (5 if you include me) with the addition of Paul Montgomery as our first dedicated sports writer.
Australian readers will know Monty through his previous startup Tinfinger and his leading Australian Rules Football site FanFooty. Paul is a journalist by trade, but I ignored that when I offered him the spot 🙂
Paul will be covering the full gauntlet of international sport with a touch of Australian sport (cricket specifically.)
Sport feed/ category
With Paul on board we’ve broken out sport into its own stand alone category + feed. If you’re subscribed to the News + Sport feed you’ll no longer see sport stories. The Media feed is still available if you’re subscribed, but media has been rolled into news.
Sport page here.
Sport feed here.
Celebrity Syndication
We’ve signed a deal with London based celebrity content provider BANG showbiz. Under the deal, we’ll be running up to 10 of their items a day (usually less, but that’s our cap). This will primarily come on top of our existing coverage. The initial deal is for three months with a review at the end. Sort of AP for celeb stories if you like. We’ve never tried syndicated content before, but you never know if you don’t try…or something like that. Because the content comes out of London, you’ll see most of it late night/ early morning US time, or occasionally late afternoon (ie, my morning.)
Picture provider
We’ve also signed up with GumGum, an ad support licensed celebrity picture service. GumGum provides images to b5media and a range of leading celebrity sites so we thought we’d give them a go. I can’t see us using them on every post, but certainly the next time we cover a big opening or similar we’ll have a ready supply of pictures to include in each post, where as today we are mostly limited to single pictures due to copyright law.
This post is the last-semi regular report of The Inquisitr numbers, and not just because the post before this was the 1500th in this incarnation of duncanriley.com (there was one before.)
I’m all for transparency, but likewise the figures wont be that exciting now. We roughly got to where we wanted to be (and it’s competitive with a range of sites), and now I’m guessing stats will be a bit roller coster-ish like. We’re bound to have some downs and ups. As always, the aim of the game is to go up, and I’m confident we well….although probably not this month, because of May:
Inquisitr page views May: 2,711,245
Record month, by a margin of about 300-400k.
We’ve had some big changes in terms of writing staff over the last rough 2 months, and as always a change is as good as a holiday. Forward we go to bigger numbers. For those who enjoyed the stats before; you know more about us than many do. I’ll endevour to be as transparent as can be, but likewise, I have no wish to send you all to sleep.
The Inquisitr dropped 2 places to 8th on the April Australian Startups list from TechNation.
This may have been available in previous months, but I’ve paid more attention this month: a Hitwise rating. According to Hitwise, The Inquisitr comes in at 7028 of the most popular web sites. Compared to some of the others in the top 10, that isn’t great, but it’s a figure I didn’t have.
They recorded Alexa at 12543, where we’re 11,678 today, maybe a delay. Compete 3907 and Quantcast 2206 I’ll happily own 🙂
One good thing about the list is the ability to sort by stat service. We come in at 4th on Compete and Quantcast.
