A fascinating and personal insight into the Long Tail in action. Earlier this week I appeared alongside illustrious company in the Wall Street Journal. However, I can't even find the referrals from there in the first few pages of my stats, with links from Google search, other educators and, lo-and-behold, Twitter, knocking the American giant of the printing press off into stat result obscurity.
There are, as usual, a lot of people typing the address into their browsers directly, but no discernible difference from normal numbers. Indeed, there's even been a 400 person decline in my subscription numbers since starting work at Channel 4 (evidently there's a great mistrust of thoughts coming from those who turn to the dark side of the media), a figure that's not buoyed by the one-hit clickers of the WSJ readership.
Conclusion? It's more worthwhile cultivating online and offline relationships with people than relying on large institutions' pull of strangers with no tangible digital breadcrumbs of their own. Here endeth the lesson.
Pic from Superamit
Interesting as I found the same thing. I've probably had a few dozen visitors at Remote Access from the journal, but not many more than that. Are Wall Street Journal reader type people just not interested in education? The fish out of water syndrome. "Why are they posting links to stuff like that here?"
Posted by: Clarence Fisher | October 04, 2008 at 04:12 PM
Just saying that the WSJ isn't sending you much traffic may not be looking at the details closely enough. The WSJ has a tremendous reader base; there's no doubt of that. However, what the WSJ is known for is its business and financial information, not so much its technology and education articles (unless they happen to crossover into the economic side).
As said, we know the readership of WSJ is huge, overall, but what is it for "Blog Watch" itself? If it's negligible for that section of the website, that would explain why you've gotten so few readers from it.
Posted by: Lelia Katherine Thomas | October 04, 2008 at 07:52 PM
Good point, Lelia, although the Blog Watch part is in print, too. Maybe that's contributing to direct browser loads. Maybe not. Impossible to do the metrics on. However, your point on readership is true perhaps. Isn't that disturbing, though, that so few people are interested in education, arguably the sector that shapes whether tomorrow we live in the way we want to or not?
Posted by: Ewan McIntosh | October 04, 2008 at 08:18 PM
I had the same thing with CNN. Probably, they have some kind of Technorati (?)widget which shows blogs that are talking about a story featured. You couldn't find your link as it was perhaps displaced by a newer blog entry from someone else.
Posted by: Craig | October 06, 2008 at 09:34 AM