Posts tagged as Traffic
We Need New Ways of Judging the Success of Websites
We have such terrible metrics for judging websites! There's income, and there's traffic, and that's about it. But neither of those take into account burn rate, overall expenditure or organization size, just for starters. One way to look at things might be: unique visitors per month, divided by employees. Size of staff is something of a predictor of size of traffic, it turns out! If you have no staff, you cannot make the traffic, for one thing. Obviously there's a slight variable in this metric—which has to do with number of part-time contributors, freelance and marketing budgets and, of course, certainly at the big behemoth, unpaid contributors. Speaking of, let's look at the Huffington Post! READ MORE
The Rise of Reddit: 4chan and Digg Get the Credit While Reddit Booms
Of the three main drivers of internet culture-blogs, social networking sites and forums-most people in the media and in the general Internet-using public only understand two. Blogs work in a very obvious way: they're like magazines or newspapers, but light. Information spreads from blog to blog up and down the food chain, but it's pretty traceable. Social networks work in a different but equally obvious way: they're like real-world word of mouth, but easier to track, though still much tougher to control or predict than blogs. READ MORE
"Chinese Fire Drill" Joke Avoided
How was your commute? "A massive traffic jam in north China that stretches for dozens of miles and hit its 10-day mark on Tuesday stems from road construction in Beijing that won't be finished until the middle of next month, an official said.... Some drivers have been stuck in the jam for five days, China Central Television reported Tuesday. But Zhang said he wasn't sure when the situation along the Beijing-Zhangjiakou highway would return to normal."
Photo: Gawker HQ's Telescreen Displays List of Most-Successful Blog Posts
This screen, mounted above the reception desk at Gawker Media's headquarters, currently displays blog posts from across the network with the most unique visitors over the course of the last hour. The names of the posts' authors are included. Earlier this week, we discussed the TV-watching cows of Russia, and suggested that, instead of pretty scenery, the cows be shown pictures of the best, most productive cows. After all, every animal likes the bellyfeel of gazing at a more successful animal. Plus, there's also a nice chilling effect! As we wrote the other day, "there's nothing more motivating than the fear that if you don't churn out enough product you're going to end up at the abattoir."
Safety Feature Inspires Disgust
Apparently this is some kind of program that has been in the test stage for years, but because nothing registers until it happens to me personally, I am only now waking up to the outrage that is the new "pedestrian countdown signal" on our city's traffic lights, some of which just appeared on 14th Street around Union Square this weekend. You're probably familiar with the signals, which count down the number of seconds remaining before the light changes, from trips to Europe or such backwater American burgs as Philadelphia, but it is gravely disappointing to see them here in my New York. I mean, it was bad enough when we got rid of "Walk/Don't Walk" as a gesture of solidarity for the colorblind illiterate, but this is a step too far. I mean, if you can't figure out when to dash across the street by timing the yellow light, shouldn't you be somewhere a little more sedate? We are making it TOO EASY FOR EVERYONE in this town.
Today In Web Traffic: Ana Marie Cox v. Jet Blue
Ana Marie Cox, Washington correspondent: 823,643 Twitter followers. Jet Blue, bargain airline: 873,897 Twitter followers. READ MORE
