As Martyn Bradbury announced yesterday, The Daily Blog has soared from an audience of zero at 9am March 1 to attracting 84,213 visits by midnight March 31. And this audience has accessed 196,886 pages pushing this new site up into 5th position on the Open Parachute blog-ratings.
From a communication strategy angle, what is particularly pleasing is how 85.04% of this traffic is located within New Zealand. I’d like to think the other 14.6% is made up of Kiwis who live abroad.
For those who consider deeper traffic analysis, The Daily Blog ends its first month with 56% returning visitors and 43.28% new visitors. It has an average visit duration of 3 minutes 23 seconds and a pages-read-per-visit ratio of 2.34. Its bounce rate for the month is 59.82%.
Without crowing too loudly, the Google Analytics statistics (cited above) reveal a phenomenal ride and offer The Daily Blog writers and commentator community a solid foundation to build upon.
If you want to follow April’s traffic performance, check out The Daily Blog’s SiteMeter realtime and prediction ratings.
After initial discussions in 2012, in January 2013 we set out to construct a site that could deliver and sustain anticipated high-audience-growth. We sought to present a secure site with a design that gave navigational priority to daily posts while offering easy access to sections and the site’s writing talent, displaying a chronology of their specialist posts.
The goal was also to provide an opportunity for a progressive thinking community to develop that was prepared to debate the issues and not fall foul of personality assassinations.
Like life, The Daily Blog is a project in development. From a design angle; thank you to Chris Trotter and all of you who have made suggestions on how we can improve your experience (Chris’ idea was to create the lead-post section on the front page). We’ve made some improvements, and we have a few tweaks yet to make. Do continue to tell us what you would like to see on The Daily Blog.
From a personal angle, what is most satisfying after one month is seeing how The Daily Blog commentators have begun, what we had hoped – create for themselves a real sense of community around the works of some of New Zealand’s top writers. Indeed the commentators on The Daily Blog have shown how deep is New Zealand’s pool of progressive thinkers. And the writing talent… well check them out here. Know too that we have some innovative community-engagement/debate ideas in development that we have yet to put before you. It is exciting and we think by creating some innovative debating opportunities for The Daily Blog community these initiatives will continue to ensure this site becomes even more valuable to you and your communities.
On that point, if you have not registered, you can do so here, and we will keep you posted.
But for now, and in celebration of the debut month, check out the Top 20 Posts for March 2013 and do read the commentators’ responses and analyses of the issues:
- TDB Top 20 Posts (March 2013, based on page views)
1: John Minto’s Peter Jackson, mental fragility, employees and contractors – Page Views: 4,725
2: Marama Davidson’s “Annette Sykes is a stupid person” says Judith Collins – Page Views: 3,547
3: Coley Tangerina’s This is no country for women – Page Views: 2,355
4: Queen Of Thorns’ Rape culture: we’re living in it – Page Views: 2,057
5: Selwyn Manning’s Rudderless Within The Great Game – Page Views: 1,922
6: Martyn Bradbury’s Latest allegation of Police bashings – Page Views: 1,817
7: Martyn Bradbury’s The leaps and bounds of Patrick Gower – how the spin is spun – Page Views: 1,753
8: Dr Wayne Hope’s Debunking the Holmes mythology – Page Views: 1,579
9: Martyn Bradbury’s Susan ‘I’m not racist but’ Devoy – Page Views: 1,533
10: Laila Harré’s Laila Harré goes all the way (WARNING: Politically explicit) – Page Views: 1,502
11: Martyn Bradbury’s When can Pakeha celebrate Waitangi Day? A response to Dame Susan Devoy – Page Views: 1,454
12: Martyn Bradbury’s How left wing are our left wing politicians? – Page Views: 1,349
13: Lynn Prentice’s Pete George – an example of right wing blogging falsehoods – Page Views: 1,330
14: Chris Trotter’s The Opportunity Cost Of David Shearer – Page Views: 1,233
15: Chris Trotter’s Welcome To The Wasteland – Page Views: 1,233
16: Steve Gray’s Full Disclosure OR Do You Know Where That Journalist Has Been? – Page Views: 1,208
17: Chris Trotter’s With God On Their Side: Explaining Labour’s Factional Divisions – Page Views: 1,205
18: Martyn Bradbury’s Greg Boyed fat shames two women via twitter – happy international women’s day – Page Views: 1,156
19: Chris Trotter’s Hell And High Water – the National Party agenda to seize water – Page Views: 1,144
20: Martyn Bradbury’s Welcome to The Daily Blog – now with Laila Harre – Page Views: 1,139.
