Another Quiet Day

The Time of My Life

First Blogger Ev comes up with this here observation:

Of course, we all want to know how we're doing compared to other people/sites/companies, so internal metrics aren't enough. And things like Media Metrix and Alexa are paid attention to by investors, and advertisers, and acquirers, and the press. So some apples-to-apples comparison is useful. If I had to pick one, in addition to unique visitors, I'd say time spent would be much more useful than pageviews.

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Ev's observation comes from experience with running large scale web sites such as blogger but it tallies with what I've been thinking over the last few days.

As I've been restarting my blog I repeatedly end up asking myself the same question.

I can easily track how many links I get and where (not many at the moment, but that'll change in time).

I can fairly well track unique visitors.

But how long do people spend reading here?

Which posts do they scan and which do they read?

Could I get away with longer posts? More story, less information?

It is one thing to get traffic and links, but what metric informs how interested and entertained your readers are? How affected?

The time they are willing to spend reading the site seems to be the most reasonable metric.

Baldur Bjarnason – 26/8/06