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The 'quantified' 2007 Desk Report

The Desk status for 2007

©07 The Media Desk
http://themediadesk.com

      Since not a lot has changed in the last twelve months, this won't be a very long report.
      "Awww shucks" Right?   of course right

      The Desk had never heard of Quantcast and their rankings. It knew about the various rankings systems used by various visitor tracking outfits, but most of them either charge for use of their service or for access to their reports (or both)- which, since the Desk neither accepts nor uses paid advertising, it has no use for the services.
      Then out of the blue it gets notified that according to Quantcast, it is in the top one million most visited sites on the Web. At first the Desk was not impressed, really, how many sites does Quantcast keep track of?
      Well…. it did some checking. They track and rank and evaluate over twenty million websites and the Desk is in the top 20% of their rankings.

      Now this was a bit of news and no mistake.

Ratings for 20,289,153 sites from www.quantcast.com

Top One Million Sites by rank….

  • 976,202 rockybranchresorts.com
  • 976,203 dessertindisguise.com
  • 976,204 themediadesk.com
  • 976,205 springsgoldteam.com
www.quantcast.com

      While the Desk would argue a bit with some of their categorizations, Quantcast did note that the Desk accepts NO ADVERTISING!
      Also, by their own admission, Quantcast does not consider overseas traffic in their analysis. You have to Register (read: pay in some way or another) to have the rest of the world included in your figures.

The demographic audience analysis presented here is focused on US internet audiences. However, Quantified Publishers can obtain break downs of the origin of their audience from all around the world.
http://www.quantcast.com/faq.jsp

      To ensure an accurate representation of the Desk's traffic Quantcast wants the Desk to put some 'measurement pixel' or 'cookie' code on its site.
      "Well.... no..."
      Of course, somewhere along the line, Quantcast will want to sell their heavy analysis and detailed reports of the Desk's traffic and then they'd include all that traffic from Australia, Greece, Argentina, and the Seychelles. Otherwise, how do they stay in business 'giving away' their reports? Bandwidth isn't free.
      "eeerrrr ... aaaahhhhhh...."
      And then they'll update their "Thumbshots Preview" of the Desk site every so often as well.....
      "Well.... thanks anyway, but no thanks."
      The Analysis the Desk does on the Free numbers it gets from its ISP seems to be enough to satisfy everybody.

And On to those numbers.

      August 2007 was almost the slowest month for the entire twelve month period (1 Sept/06 to 31 Aug/07) with just over 48,000 hits.
      However, it was preceded by several of the busiest months in Desk history with several months over 60,000 each and an amazing January with 70,011 which was almost a record. The overall average was within five hundred points of last year's average and the total within shouting distance of last year's as well.

For preceding 12 months.
High, January- 70,011
Low, November- 48,114
Average- 53,007
Total for 12 month period- 636,095

      Countries represented still included places like Australia (288 hits for August), Greece (2), Argentina (10), and the Seychelles (6).

      General non-fiction has been more or less the focus lately (if anything is), and those articles have drawn a good bit of traffic with the Scams and Spams and Urban Legends page is still the highest single draw.
      New Fiction (when posted) does pretty well. Even TheHunter series had a thousand visitors for the month.
      The various photoessays still do pretty well, and some of the older ones have still been bringing people in.

      What this all tells the Desk is that it's traffic growth may have peaked and it's audience is now mature. It took over ten years for it to happen, but it seems to have gotten there.
      Which is fine. If traffic to the Desk is going to sit at about 50,000 a month (sometimes more, sometimes less) that's fine. Actually, the Desk is doing just about the same sorts of things now as it was back when the world was young and it took a whole year to break fifty thousand visitors.
      Those that like whatever it is that the Desk does seem to like it and the Desk likes doing it and when the Desk does it they like it so the Desk does what they like and it'll keep doing it because they keep liking it as long as the Desk is doing it.
      There.

      Now about some interesting outsiders citing the Desk as a source.

      Several bloggers and discussion boards have listed one or the other Desk articles about everything from Email scams to the Zwinky spyware 'thing' as an authoritative source worthy being quoted in a blog.
      How does the Desk feel about this?
      Well... it's not sure.
      Yes it is a compliment, as long as they get the link right in their piece, which a couple of them weren't able to do, and the Desk will take it as such. At least they credited their source.
      As long as they don't call the Desk a 'blogger'. We won't put up with that.

Thank you
End of report


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