On Pageviews and Stats, or Inside Baseball That is Sure to Bore You

Long time readers of our little blog may recall some early posts where we patted ourselves on the back for achieving milestone numbers of pageviews since the inception DI.  You might wonder why it's been a while since we've crowed triumphantly about the amount of views we've gotten here.  It's not because Blogger's dashboard isn't listing an even bigger number of pageviews for us.  Currently, it's at nearly 6000 views.  Here's a snapshot of DI's dashboard:

A lot of pageviews for a little blog...right?

The stats in Blogger's dashboard give us a count of views for each post, plus total views, traffic sources, etc.  Turns out Blogger's stats are bogus.  We've recently switched over to using Google Analytics to track visits and views (plus AdSense reports) and have discovered the shocking truth that you can't trust Blogger's stats.  At all.  Based on what AdSense and Analytics show, we estimate that the real number of actual people actually reading posts is about 1/5 that number.  Sigh.

Why is that?  Well it turns out there is a lot of spam going on on the interwebs.  The vast majority of the "traffic" on our blog comes from search crawlers, spam bots, scrapers, and worst of all, refferal spam.  Lame.  So, we recall what we said in point number two of this post, and realize that there really aren't that many of you clammoring to know what we have to say.  If you are clammoring, please leave a comment letting us know we are liked.  We are vain like that.  If you aren't clammoring, please leave a comment telling us why.  We are pragmatic and open to constructive criticism like that, also.

Disirregardless, of what the stats say, we will be back next week with a series of posts on what we think the second term of the Obama administration will look like.  (In case you hadn't read it here, the Presidential race is over.)  Enjoy the weekend.

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