Saturday, January 2, 2016

Look at all the blog hits - that means I must be right!

Anthony Watts has made one of his rare appearances on his blog to report his blog stats for 2015 (archived here). They are impressive, although as he pointed out, slightly worse than last year. I doubt that his claim of being the #1 climate related blog in the world is true. There are other climate-related blogs like those of Jeff Masters and his colleagues at Weather Underground, Joe Romm at Think Progress, which I'd guess have a lot more visits than WUWT does. And if you judge #1 by quality rather than number of visitors, WUWT would rank well below zero on a scale of one to ten, way, way below quality climate blogs like realclimate.org and well below skepticalscience.com and any of the blogs listed in HotWhopper's blogroll.

Anthony reported that WUWT had almost 42,000,000 page hits last year. For comparison, for every pageview at HotWhopper, WUWT gets nearly 40 page hits. For comparison with Judith's blog (she has also reported her stats, archived here), for every visit to Judith's blog, WUWT gets almost ten page hits. (Visits are just under 10% of the page hits at WUWT. I think "visits" probably equates with Google Analytic's "users", which comprise slightly more than 10% of the page hits at HotWhopper. Google Analytics also lists "sessions", which comprise more than half the page views at HotWhopper.)

Another thing was that Anthony seems to have discovered a whole heap of new countries - or maybe WordPress regards some places as countries that nobody else does. Here is what he showed:


237 countries? Does that include various territories of nations, and maybe uninhabited islands? (I note that Anthony disregards Australia, which looks to have about the same number of visits as his UK and Canada.)

Comparing the white spaces on Anthony's map, it looks to me as if HotWhopper might get visits from more countries, for all its smaller audience. Google Analytics shows HotWhopper had visits from 196 countries since I started collecting stats from there, back in April 2013. And it shows visits from 172 different countries since 1 January 2015. That's mostly independent countries, but I see that the US Virgin Islands is listed separately, which is probably okay, given they don't have all the privileges of people living in USA proper.

Below is a map showing where HotWhopper's visitors come from:

,



HotWhopper is still a new kid on the block compared to WUWT and to Judith Curry's blog, and there's plenty of room for improving its reach. I've got to say, though, that I regard the quality of readers of HotWhopper much more highly than those of WUWT and Judith's, judging by the comments left here and there.


Since I'm also comparing visits and visitors, I won't point the finger. However I wonder if Anthony and Judith suffer from "all these blog hits means I must be right" syndrome, as illustrated in this Gabby cartoon:



Judith lists her guest authors, who are mostly (not all) climate science deniers, pseudo-science quacks or climate contrarians. She must be proud of them.

There are many, many more websites with information about climate science, global warming and climate change than there are websites for climate science denial. They range from general climate websites to specialist websites run by experts in particular fields. Being a big fish in a small pond is not so hard. But how would you define the pond? WUWT isn't a climate blog, it's a conspiracy blog that specialises in stories about the supposed grand climate hoax, replete with claims that scientists are all engaged in fraud and other nefarious activities, and that we're really heading for an ice age.

I wonder how Anthony's blog stats compare to other popular conspiracy websites.  Beating Above Top Secret and Infowars for page hits is the real target Anthony should be aiming for (and it could well be his target, though he would have a long way to go).

11 comments:

  1. Blog statistics such as unique visitors to a site are available from Google. When I last looked there were several climate blogs that each had 10 to 100 times more hits that WUWT. That should not surprise anyone.

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  2. And how many are like me? I visit [with reducing frequency these days] just to view the car crash.

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    1. Phil, I'd say you're in the 1.6%. If Anthony's poll some time ago is any indication, only 1.6% of WUWT readers accept climate science. His audience is mostly made up of climate conspiracy theorists and the wilfully ignorant. They flock to places like WUWT and probably Prison Planet, InfoWars and Drudge, and going by the comments, some of his readers would be hogging various right wing extremist/vigilante blogs (post KKK). Climate cranks don't have a lot of choices to vent - there are the blogs of Jo Nova, Roy Spencer, Judith Curry and WUWT mainly. WUWT and Jo Nova's are the main ones sympathetic to rabid right wing extremism. Roy very occasionally diverts into science to the dismay of his fans, and Judith's blog is a bit too "highbrow denialist" for most of the WUWT hoi polloi. Too many multi-syllable words like un-cer-tain-ty.

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  3. The funniest thing is that some people on WUWT think that "hits" equates to "visitors."

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    1. That's probably because Anthony himself equated blog hits with people (visiting MoMA). Even "visitors" can't be equated with people, because after a certain period the same person will be counted multiple times.

      His "visitors" show up as fewer than 10% of the hits, and the actual number of people would be substantially less than that. Even if WP stored all the IP addresses for the year, it would be counting people with dynamic IP addresses as different people, people who log on from work and home as different people etc etc. If it counts by cookies - people who clear their cookies as unique visitors, people who switch browsers etc.)

      In fact, the number of people who visit his blog each year is probably substantially *less* than the number who visit MoMA each year, not substantially more.

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  4. The text about MoMA is a standard text from Wordpress, they generate these narrated statistics similarly every year.

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    1. Is that so, Bert. It's very misleading, isn't it.

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  5. I am 97% certain that Willard Wattamaroon Watts has met his Waterloo.

    His blog may soon attract attention he is ill prepared to handle.

    I have been silent here in the Wingnut Alternate Universe for more than two years. my feet have been firmly planted in reality. Recently Reggie became privy to the FACT that Steve Goddard is soon be swimming with the fishes For a reason known only to himself the intellectual midget trolled the Divine One on Twitter which was wisely ignored.
    The poor little boy felt the need to attack the singer at that cesspool he calls a blog. Naturally his mindless minions joined in by hurling fetid feces. Unfortunately for Tony Heller this offended a fan of Bette Midler who felt the need to defend her honour.
    The gentleman from Montreal has taken it upon himself to see that the troll receives it's just deserts. To make a long story short, the demise of the Goddard troll is going to lead to to what will certainly be uncomfortable times for Tony the science denier, his inept crew and last and of course least... his sheeple trolls.

    I really love this blog and have been a faithful lurker. You're incredible and I admire your patience with the witless wingnuts.
    Keep up with the good work and I will keep an eye out for you on Twitter, the WINGULARITY has arrived.

    I can resist anything but temptation....here are my two favourite Watts'videos, there is a backstory to both.

    Let the good times to roll.

    WHATAMAROON

    http://tinyurl.com/b5kppjq

    Why Willard is so sensitive about CTIM with the just deseved title of denier. Someone who is to remain nameless for now posted this video at Watts' science fiction blog.

    http://bit.ly/1kBrnhQ

    I love that video @ 111....that F***** Steven Goddard.




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    1. "We should have denied the measurements all along! Stick to what we're good at." :-)

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  6. Timely post, giving that Curry recently boasted about her own stats.

    Also, Sou rated a mention I noticed...

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