Until now Indonesia Matters‘ rating system has been the defacto authority on the ranking of blogs in Indonesia. The system used, while seemingly logical, always seemed a bit out of kilter with Unspun‘s observations of blog content and the kinds as well as the numbers of readers they can attract.
But being someone not too tech savvy Unspun could not figure out how reliable the system was and there does not seem to be a quick and easy system to see how many eyeballs blogs attract.
Recently, however, Unspun‘s tech savvy colleague Hanny introduced him to Statbrain.com and out of curiousity Unspun ran the URLs of Indonesia Matters’ list of 10 top English blogs on it to see what the figures are. It contained a few surprises. Some blogs considered by Indonesia Matters’ system as high flyers actually had, according to StatBrain, less than 10 visits per day.
Statbrain’s re-ranking of the top 10 are:
- Fatih Syuhud @ 5,896 visits per day
- Michael Jubel @ 3,519 views per day
- Nomad 4 Ever @ 2,576 views per day
- Sarapan Ekonomi @1,720 views per day
- Unspun @ 1,694 views per day
- Java Jive @ 1,632 views per day
Surprisingly the rest from Indonesia Matters’ Top 10 English Language Blogs list – Gerakan Bawah Tanah, Jakartass, Indonesia Anonymus and Treespotter – had, according to Statbrain, “less than 10 visits per day.”
Surely this can’t be right? Perhaps someone with more technical finesse than Unspun can explain to all of us how reliable one system of rating is against other.
Unspun 
My counters would suggest I am getting a few more page views and visits that what Statbrain says.
I do not know how these things work. In any event, I guess it would be nice to be read, but ultimately my blogging is as much about amusing myself as it is about amusing others.
Thanks for the link though.
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posted a comment earlier but it seems to have been captured.
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I suppose it begs the question: who cares?
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Statbrain measures traffic only (based on out of date Alexa scores), my list has 6 factors and only one of them is based on traffic/Alexa (and Alexa is really not very reliable anyway). Traffic is relative to topic, if Unspun decided to write posts about ‘sexy girls in jakarta’ or ‘download pcmav 1.xxxx’ then he’d get a lot more traffic, but does that mean his blog is ‘better’ or more ‘important’?
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Oh, and Brett, indeed rankings are not important, it’s just a bit of fun, for the bloggers it might be a good way to promote themselves and get a good link….
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@Brett: I suppose your reaction begs the question: “Then why bother to read the post and then write the comment if you don’t care?” It is studied nonchalance like this that perhaps prompted the bard to come up wit the soundbite that s/he doth protest too much?
I’m with Patung on this. I think rankings are not terribly important but as humans we are hardwired to compare and measure. And it’s all fun if you don’t take it too seriously. Plus I think no one’s come up with a definitive way of measuring blogs’ influence or popularity because of their diversity in subjects and readership.
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My blog has 2,440 visits per day according to Statbrain.com. That seems too many. Happy nonetheless:D
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mine got 2,408, which is strange since both my in-blog counter and sitemeter have two different numbers. Much less.
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very interesting post – was just chatting with Patung on this. however, for fear of hijacking the post and posting an overly long commment and upsetting unspun once more too often, I’ve put up a post on Indonesiamatters ranking here.
http://treeatwork.blogspot.com/2008/11/on-indonesiamatters-blog-rank-and.html
thanks
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Nomadforever is no longer Indonesia-based. SarapanEkonomi seems inactive.
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Did Unspun deleted my comment here earlier? What exactly did i say???
uh well, never mind, i was just saying i’ve posted on my blog. as if anybody really gives a shit.
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@tree: Relax. It is Akismet rather than Unspun that has it in for your comment. I’ve negotiated a hostage release with Akismet and restored comment in its full glory.
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Like Rob, I don’t b;log to achieve high ratings. However, I have about 100 subscribers to each post and c.800 page views per week, say 200 visits a day.
Patung’s criteria are not solely based on one source, but include rankings for links in and out, plus blogroll entries, which may account for my high ranking.
BTW. Thanks for the mention; it’s always nice to get a circulation boost.
😉
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@unspun, I’m trying to worry less about those stats. Be it Pagerank, Alexa, Google, Sitemeter or Indonesia Matters Stats.
They are anyway more subjective methods, as long there isn’t any transparency or even a voting process on how the factors should factor in the mix. Otherwise you could always tailor-made those benchmarks according to your current need. For instance, measuring Bloglines (does somebody still use that?) subscribers instead of RSS, or giving overly weight to PageRank or Delicious.
So Patung has to be given credit, that he took up the work to compare all those Indonesia-centric sites regularly and that he put this benchmark initially up. Which brought his own site more traffic and reputation also. Nobody else did that so far, so no need for us to question his methods.
As well, websites come and go. My site nomad4ever.com was just removed from the index, as I moved on to Goa/India, so I’m not based in Indonesia anymore. Another subjective criteria, but I won’t complain or design another benchmark site.
It all depends on what you want to achieve with your site anyway. Your content matters!
😉
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according to statbrain.com, mine has the average of 411 visitors per day.
That can’t be right! LOL.
And the minute I typed my URL it took less than a second to come up with the numbers, I wonder how the site does it.
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uh… okai. akismet is bad.
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I think to get better prediction is to install visitor meter like sitemeter, histats, or google analytics. It keeps track the number of people who actually visit your site.
Sitebrain tells me I have 2,462 visits a day, where my stat says 120 per day. As flattering as it might seem, I prefer to belief my own stat calculation rather than sitebrain’s.
The likely reason why I get higher hits at sitebrain (even than Unspun’s) is because I have higher Alexa ranking.
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hmm i think all blogspot blogs get “less than 10” ratings, aint it?
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