Daniel Brusilovsky’s Teens in Tech Hacked, Numbers Revealed

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A hacker got his way into Daniel Brusilovsky’s blog network Teens in Tech and shared some details with Net News Daily. Among those is the actual numbers on the network, and it puts Brusilovsky’s previous numbers in questionable doubt. This is what he said in an interview from the BlogHer conference, also found via the Net News Daily story, when talking about the size of Teens in Tech network: “About 10,000 regular subscribers”.

Problem is, the hacker found something else. Net News Daily says it is “a base 400-odd people, 150 of which, we can reveal, are spam accounts”, according to the hacker.

Brusilovsky clarified the situation in a blog post, and also commented on the numbers:

I also wanted to personally clarify some of the numbers quoted in the reports, which suggest I have overstated our current position. We are in the early phase of our network. We are proud of what we have accomplished so far, and have aggressive growth plans. At this time, we have more than 400 active users, and 600 over our network sites. These sites see more than 10,000 individual accesses monthly, and are expanding.

So “about 10,000 regular subscribers” is pushing it a bit, but maybe he meant unique visitors, or the total amount of RSS subscribers. Hard to tell, but it isn’t hard to draw the conclusion that the previous numbers might be a bit bloated.

Gawker Media Traffic Sees 17% Increase In First Five Months 2009

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One of the good things with having your stats open in public, like Gawker Media has (using Sitemeter by the way), is that you can get others reporting on how much you grow. Like Simon Owens, who blogs at Bloggasm, and has been analyzing the stats, finding that the Gawker Media network (BloodCopy not included, of course!) increased by 17% during the first five months of 2009.

For the first five months of ‘09 the blogs showed a combined 1.4 billion page views, compared to 1.19 billion in the last five months of ‘09 — a jump of over 200 million.

To conduct this survey I compiled page view data from Gawker Media’s Sitemeter stats from each of the blogs. The number of page views does not represent the number of unique visitors to a site, but rather the number of times a page was loaded.

More numbers and analysis by Owens in the Bloggasm post. I guess Gawker Media could just link it, sit back, and save the money on that marketing rep who usually does these things.

Twitter Growth Graph Not So Impressive Anymore

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It seems as if Twitter hit one of those famous big steps in traffic, the increase has halted to a mere 1% up, says Compete, who also thinks that this means that Twitter clocks in at 19.7 million visitors. That’s a whole lotta twittering going on. I wonder when we’ll get some stats on how many users are actually using Twitter, since these things only track the web visitors, and I rarely load up twitter.com myself, preferring Tweetie and similar stand alone applications.

Mashable The New Tech Blog #1, Passes TechCrunch

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Is this news? Not really, but I find it interesting to see that Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Mashable now has passed TechCrunch, according to Compete.com. Complete with graph and everything. But is traffic everything? Of course not, new startups still dream of being featured on TechCrunch, and I bet they’d still prefer that to Mashable. Actually, I think the two blogs are so different that the whole comparison is a bit flawed.

But again, isn’t it interesting that a third blog (SAI) is comparing two other blogs to each other, and writes about it? Almost makes the blogosphere echo chamber debate seem motivated again.

Free 7 Day Course on Business Blogging

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Do you want to know how to set up, plan, write and promote a business blog, plus create an audience that loves you, with content that keeps people coming back for more?

Well you are in luck! I have written an information-packed 7 day blogging course for my friends at Simplweb, the Joomla turnkey site people, and best of all it is free. [Read more…]

Sunday Morning SEO: Improve Your Rankings by Increasing Your Traffic

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Sugarrae published an interesting study on her blog a couple months ago. It’s entitled You Don’t Need SEO to Rank in Google. It basically shows that increasing your traffic can help your rankings. Usually we think of it backwards. We do SEO to increase our traffic, but if you have a knack for attracting visitors without doing SEO, your rankings will improve as a by product. [Read more…]

Gawker Media Continues to Break Traffic Records

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Recession or no, people surely won’t stop reading the Gawker Media sites, and as long as Denton & Co. can continue to sell ads on a CPM basis, they should be able to ride this one through. October is another record high, according to the network site, clocking in at 297 million pageviews, and 22 million unique visitors. Crazy.

More at the Gawker Media site, and over at Quantcast.

Weblogs, Inc is Doing Well Under AOL

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Weblogs, IncWeblogs, Inc, the blog network founded by Jason “I’m not blogging anymore” Calacanis, is doing well under AOL’s ownership. In a presentation, published by TechCrunch on Docstoc, they show massive growth since 2005. Just to illustrate, in 2005 Weblogs, Inc had a estimated revenue of $6 million and 4 employees. In 2008, the same numbers are $30 million and 26 employees. Add a massive traffic increase, with a unique visitor growth of 994% between October 2005 and August 2008, and the success story that is Weblogs, Inc just seems all the more impressive.

Of course, the growth is possibly due to the fact that the blogosphere by itself have had a massive growth during this period as well, with blogs going mainstream and getting the recognition they deserve (and sometimes don’t), but numbers are numbers, and they generally don’t lie.

Check out the full presentation for more number crunching. It’s just 10 pages and mostly pictures, so it’s very accessible. It also shows how much larger Weblogs, Inc is when compared to both Gawker Media’s network, and b5media.

Hiring Bloggers: Know Your Performance Numbers

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Blogging JobsWhile attending the How to Hire a Professional Blogger For Your Business session at Blog World Expo, it was very interesting to learn that you have to know your performance numbers and how they work in order to really understand what it takes to make money as a hired blogger.

As part of this series on what you need to know about hiring a professional blogger and being hired, let’s look at what the pros had to say about performance numbers and metrics and what you need to know before you go pro.

Gregory Go of About.com Guide to Online Business made it clear to the crowded room about how the numbers drive payment and drives success when it comes to paying a blogger. “If you are looking to make money blogging for a company or blog network, you have to understand the metrics.”

Gregory listed three key web analytics that should be used to set a price for paying a blogger.

  1. Consistency – Word Count Metric: Number of posts per week or month published with a minimum word count per post.
  2. Internal Metrics: Numbers based upon direct interaction and actions such as comment count, feed or newsletter subscribers, and direct sales generated.
  3. External Metrics: Performance compared to the general Internet/blogosphere metrics. This includes page view counts and referrer or inbound links.

While few pay solely based upon one of these three metrics, most blogs and blog networks compensate bloggers based upon a combination of these numbers. [Read more…]