Say Anything Blog

Internet traffic analysis is a pretty tough game.  There’s all sorts of ways to measure it, but any way you try has its weaknesses.  You can look at page views, but that doesn’t give you the number of people who actually visited.  Just the number of pages loaded.  And even then you don’t know if the pages loaded are actually being read, of if people are just clicking through quickly.  You can try to narrow things down with IP addresses, but even then you run into problems with situations where massive groups of people share the same IP address (college campuses and *ahem* government agencies).

So it’s tough.  The best thing you can really do to compare multiple websites is to just use one common traffic analysis tool for each site and then compare the results.  The analysis tool in question may have its weaknesses, but at least it will be equally weak in measuring each of the given sites.

With those caveats in mind, I decided to compare this website’s traffic with those of some other local websites.  I was pretty surprised at what I found.  Here’s an analysis of Say Anything, The Bismarck Tribune, The Fargo Forum, The Grand Forks Herald and the Forum’s community blogging website Area Voices using the Alexa traffic analysis tool.

It’s a little hard to read, so click for a larger view.  I plugged in some URL’s from other North Dakota blogs, but their traffic was too low even to be measured by this tool.

What I was amazed at is that Say Anything consistently beats North Dakota’s three biggest news websites in page views, as well as every single blog on the Forum’s blogging platform combined.  Which doesn’t surprise me because Area Voices, as blogging platforms go, is awful...but even I was a little taken aback by the overall comparisons.

What does this mean?  Well, it doesn’t mean that blogs like Say Anything will ever replace so-called “hard journalism” outlets like these newspapers.  Most bloggers like me simply do not cover stories the way journalists do.  What it does mean, though, is that blogs like this one are getting read just as often as traditional news sites are.

That’s pretty significant.