In a reply to Greg Friese who commented on today’s EMS 2.0 post, I mentioned numbers of blog visits. Or “hits” as they are commonly known. I mentioned that Ambulance Driver averages under 1,000 a day. I didn’t mention that I get about 150 hits per day, but that’s about what I get unless I get a surge from Ambulance Driver. I also mentioned that I generally do better when I post about politics, which a lot of people are interested in. As compared to EMS, which is a niche market.
Here is some further proof of my position. JayG over at MArooned, writes about politics, guns, road rage (his), and cars for the most part. He averages 1,600 hits per day. Borepatch over at Borepatch, writes about politics, computer and internet security, guns (a bit), and even country music. He averages 500 hits a day. Ann Althouse at Althouse is a middle of the road political blogger. She even voted for Obama in ’08, although I think she regrets that now. She gets about 29,000 hits on average every day. I consider her a big time blogger, but I don’t know if she does. Glenn Reynolds writes Instapundit. Instapundit is the Big Kahuna of political blogs. Every blogger who reads Instapundit craves a link from Reynolds, what is commonly referred as an “Instalanche”. One of which can drive servers to melt down if they are small enough. By the way “every blogger” includes me. Just saying. Care to guess how many hits Professor Reynolds gets at his heavily politically oriented blog? Over 500,000. Every day, day in, day out.
Instapundit is pretty influential in blogging circles. That’s because a lot of people read it every day. Since it’s updated several times a day some people visit many times during the day. People want Prof. Reynolds to link to them, want him to review or even mention his book or article, want his attention.
If the bloggers who are behind EMS 2.0 want to get attention and influence decision makers, then these are the type of numbers they are going to have to get.
That’s a pretty steep hill to climb, so they better get going.
Good points TOTW, I don't ever desire to hit the 'big time' though… too much responsibility there 🙂 I just want to have fun in my little corner of the blogsphere! Having said that, you are dead on, to have a real impact, you MUST get >100,000 hits a day…
100,000 hits a day? Now I have something to strive for. Our numbers are pretty similar. My biggest days have come when I have had links to my posts from the Grand Rounds blog carnival and a few of the sm'ores.
It's strange the things that bring people to the blog (well, to my blog, at least). Country music traffic is way disproportionate to the number of posts. I usually do 1 post a week on that, but maybe 15-20% of my traffic is on that.What I think, though, is that people come for a range of topics. I don't think I have a "security" or "political" blog, I think most people see it as a mix. They pick up the security stuff when they come for the goofy stuff.EMS to you is probably similar to security for me. Not sure that there's a big demand (or traffic for) EMS, any more than there is for security.My $0.02 worth.
It is more important to have 15 passionate visitors who actually read the content than 1,500 visitors that skim, are image searches, spam bots, or just passer-bys.