{"id":2380,"date":"2008-03-16T11:48:40","date_gmt":"2008-03-16T11:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/16\/what-kind-of-blogging-brings-t\/"},"modified":"2008-03-16T11:48:40","modified_gmt":"2008-03-16T11:48:40","slug":"what-kind-of-blogging-brings-t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/16\/what-kind-of-blogging-brings-t\/","title":{"rendered":"What Kind of Blogging Brings the Most Traffic?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A little while back, there was some discussion of what science blogging should be<\/a>, where the question of what draws the most traffic came up. A couple<\/a> of<\/a> people<\/a> said they see more traffic from “real” science posts than from other trivia, in contrast to my claim that I see more traffic from other stuff.<\/p>\n

It occurs to me that I have inadvertently run the experiment to test this over the past week: This week, I posted five hard-core physics posts, one each week day, and three of them were also tagged for ResearchBlogging.org<\/a>. I also posted a bunch of frivolous things– animal pictures, FutureBaby playlists, a jokey guide to talking like a physicist. So, what does looking at the traffic numbers from Google Analytics tell us?<\/p>\n

Talk Like a Physicist<\/a> was the runaway winner for the week, with 1,215 pageviews (the second-place post had 453). The five hard-core physics posts (Cavity QED<\/a>, Cold Plasmas<\/a>, Biophysics<\/a>, Francium<\/a>, and Four-Wave Mixing<\/a>) all together<\/strong> netted 1,180 page views. Each of those five probably took an hour and a half to write, if not more. “Talk Like a Physicist” took fifteen minutes. Not one of the physics posts made the top five most-viewed posts for the week– not one of them even managed to beat the first FutureBaby playlist for page views.<\/p>\n

When I say that I get more traffic from posting about things other than physics, that’s what I’m talking about.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So, how do I reconcile these numbers with what John Hawks and others said during the recent discussion? I’m not sure. One possibility would be that I just have a higher threshold for what I consider a lot of traffic– back before I joined ScienceBlogs, I would’ve been happy to get 1,200 page views for a week’s worth of blogging. Now, that’s a rotten total for a Sunday.<\/p>\n

Another possibility is that there just aren’t that many people who care about physics. The people who report significantly better traffic from serious science posts are working in sciences that are more broadly accessible than physics– anthropology, cognitive science, biomedical science. There’s probably a bigger audience for that sort of thing than for detailed discussion of experimental atomic physics. The most successful of the physics posts was the one about biophysics, which might lend some support to this explanation.<\/p>\n

Whatever the explanation, the fact is that, for me, serious posts about peer-reviewed physics generally involve a great deal of work, for very little reward. I’m not going to stop posting that stuff– I didn’t write those posts because I thought they would get me tons of traffic, I wrote them because I genuinely enjoyed those lab visits, and came back fired up about the cool science going on at NIST and UMD. I’ve got another one queued up for tomorrow (mentally, anyway– I haven’t written it yet). Other science-related things draw a better return on the investment of time– the “Users Guide to Vacuum Pumps” posts (Part 1<\/a>, Part 2<\/a>) did very well, with 432 and 331 pageviews, respectively, and “Basic Concepts” posts do fairly well. But the peer-reviewed stuff just isn’t going to pay the bills.<\/p>\n

For the record, here are the top 20 posts, in number of page views, according to Analytics, for the week of March 9-15:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \t\/talk_like_a_physicist.php\t1,215\t<\/li>\n
  2. \t\/pimp_me_new_blogs_1.php\t453\t<\/li>\n
  3. \t\/a_users_guide_to_vacuum_pumps.php\t432\t<\/li>\n
  4. \t\/tips_for_speakers.php\t333\t<\/li>\n
  5. \t\/a_users_guide_to_vacuum_pumps_1.php\t331\t<\/li>\n
  6. \t\/futurebaby_playlist_ab.php\t317\t<\/li>\n
  7. \t\/art_and_animals.php\t275\t<\/li>\n
  8. \t\/lab_visit_report_biophysics.php\t258\t<\/li>\n
  9. \t\/lab_visit_report_francium.php\t256\t<\/li>\n
  10. \t\/post_3.php\t251\t<\/li>\n
  11. \t\/lorentz_contracted_asteroids.php\t244\t<\/li>\n
  12. \t\/nice_beaver.php\t243\t<\/li>\n
  13. \t\/lab_visit_report_cold_plasmas.php\t236\t<\/li>\n
  14. \t\/headline_mismatch.php\t193\t<\/li>\n
  15. \t\/score_one_for_physics.php\t184\t<\/li>\n
  16. \t\/lab_visit_report_fourwave_mixi.php\t179\t<\/li>\n
  17. \t\/futurebaby_playlist_cg.php\t174\t<\/li>\n
  18. \t\/interstellar_economics.php\t169\t<\/li>\n
  19. \t\/imperturbable_ducks.php\t146\t<\/li>\n
  20. \t\/slothinabox_1.php\t139\t<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    (“Post 3” is the Cavity QED lab vist report, because I saved it before I titled it. You can figure out all the rest of them pretty easily.)<\/p>\n

    (Caveats: These numbers are “Page Views” not “Unique Page Views,” so a monkey hitting “Refresh” over and over could greatly inflate the tally. This also accounts for a little over half of the traffic to the blog over the past week– 7,105 of the 12,863 pageviews over the past week went to a specific individual post page from the month of March, with the rest just hitting the front page, or going to some older post page. These numbers might also be a hair low, because Analytics tends to lag a bit, but it should’ve picked up everything from yesterday.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A little while back, there was some discussion of what science blogging should be, where the question of what draws the most traffic came up. A couple of people said they see more traffic from “real” science posts than from other trivia, in contrast to my claim that I see more traffic from other stuff.… Continue reading What Kind of Blogging Brings the Most Traffic?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}