Patrick Ruffini Bursts DailyKOS’ Bubble

Wednesday, Patrick Ruffini blogged that he thought he had discovered a problem with the way blog traffic on the DailyKOS was being tabulated by SiteMeter:

SiteMeter only accounts for the last 100 visitors individually. On a site like Daily Kos, the 100th most recent visitor could have been 15 seconds ago. If you are the 101st most recent visitor and you click on a new page, you are counted as a new unique visitor in SiteMeter’s all important count. On a normal site, this wouldn’t matter, since it’s highly unlikely you’ll stick around long enough to have 100 others show up after you. On a site with hundreds of thousands of page views a day, it’s extremely likely you will.

[...]

To be fair, some conservative blogs probably fall in this boat, though the skew is probably no more than 20-30% in the most extreme case simply because we don’t fall in quite the same traffic league as Kos.

Wednesday, Ruffini followed up on his theory, and explained:

I just finished conducting a test that proves my hypothesis of Sitemeter’s overcounting of visits to high traffic blogs.

For my test I selected my other blog home, Hugh Hewitt’s Townhall blog, as it allowed me brisk few minutes on the 100 recent visitors list. Any blog with more traffic would not have allowed me enough time to collect the data I needed, but would also magnify this anomaly many times over.

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Meryl Yourish has told us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, quoting Sitemeter’s FAQ chapter and verse, and calling me a technical neophyte.

FHK uses a variety of blog traffic counters. When evaluating the traffic of a site, it is important to review and compare all of the available evidence, to come to an accurate conclusion.

Also see:

• HotAir - Ruffini proves that Kos’s traffic is inflated?
• Full Metal Cynic - Daily Kos numbers game controversy, or Take the numbers and run
• The Van Der Galiën Gazette - Would the World be Better Off…