April 17, 2006

Can You Answer This? – 14

Yo! Have you checked out the Thesis Theme yet? I’d love to explain how optimized, detailed, and easily-customizable Thesis is, but honestly, I know that you’re going to benefit the most from the amazing community of theme users. Smart people offering up tailored solutions to common theme problems? Now that’s serious value.

By now, you probably know that I’m a number junky, so it should come as no surprise that I normally spend part of my day picking apart this site’s metrics. Ever since mid March, I’ve had an inordinate amount of “referrals” from NewsGator, and although I’ve checked out the referral URL, I can’t figure out why I’m getting so much inbound traffic from them! Since I’m totally stumped, I’m now turning to you for the answer :)

Does everybody use NewsGator or what?

I guess the obvious answer to this question is that a huge number of Pearsonified readers also use NewsGator as their RSS solution. The problem I have with this is that no one has ever contacted me and said, “Duuuude, you just gotta check out NewsGator, it’s the dope shizzle.”

I haven’t come across a large number of bloggers who herald NewsGator as the RSS platform of choice either. In fact, I have always been under the impression that FeedBurner was more or less the market leader outside of the Google and Yahoo! readers of the world.

Am I way off base here? Check out the referral metrics for this site in the graphic below:

By more than a 7 to 1 margin, the NewsGator subscriber page is my number one referrer. Either I’ve got a couple of NewsGator readers who are spastically hitting the inbound link button to this site in order to satisfy some sort of weird obsessive compulsion, or else everybody and his freakin brother is on NewsGator, and I’m just out of the loop.

Before I go nuts, please provide me with some further insight into this issue! Do you use NewsGator? Do you have OCD and have to hit my inbound link 236 times because you have to do everything 236 times? What’s going on here?

14 Comments ↓

#Jesse  at 11:06 am on Apr 17, 2006

Weird. I use bloglines…newsgator drove me nuts. I hated it

#Mike  at 12:09 pm on Apr 17, 2006

I use the IE edition of Pluck.

Like Shaggy said, ” Wasn’t me. “

#Dennis Bullock  at 12:12 pm on Apr 17, 2006

Hey I use NewsGator.

#Chris P.  at 12:23 pm on Apr 17, 2006

Dennis, I know you’re around here quite a bit, but 2885 inbound referrals? That can’t be all you…can it?

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#Dennis Bullock  at 1:03 pm on Apr 17, 2006

I dont have that much time on my hands.

#Chris P.  at 1:12 pm on Apr 17, 2006

Didn’t think so ;)

#Dennis Bullock  at 3:36 pm on Apr 17, 2006

What do you use for your stats?

#Chris P.  at 3:47 pm on Apr 17, 2006

Webalizer 2.01

#Cesar G.  at 4:55 pm on Apr 17, 2006

I signed up for NewsGator once and during the sign-up process they “recommended” a bunch of feeds. Maybe you ended up on one of their recommendation pages?

#Chris P.  at 5:15 pm on Apr 17, 2006

Cesar, when I first started noticing this jump in referrals, I thought that might be the case. If it’s true, then I’ve been “recommended” for about a month now.

While that sounds great, it also seems too good to be true.

#Mike  at 7:36 pm on Apr 17, 2006

BTW - I’ve only had 13 visitors from NewsGator so far this month…so I’m jealous !

#Devin  at 11:56 pm on Apr 17, 2006

My guess is it’s now their favicon support. It’s about a month old and it fetches your favicon everyone loads the page. I use NewsGator so I’m surely one to blame..

#Charlie  at 3:29 pm on Apr 19, 2006

NewsGator is constantly refreshing. It could be that each hit is an individual refresh. Each article may be getting refreshed, it adds up.

#ozz  at 10:50 am on Nov 14, 2006

could be spiders. They are a big thing, and I’ve seen an article that says something like that. can’t remember exactly though. You could do a research ;)

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