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.