Following up on yesterday’s post, Law Prof Blog Rankings: as others have pointed out, raw traffic numbers (visitors and page views) are only one of the measures of the influence of blogs. “Stickiness’ — the amount of time readers spend on a blog — also is an important metric. Unfortunately, the SiteMeter measure — Average Visit Length — is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it computes the average only for the most recent week. Second, it begins counting the visit length only when a reader goes to a second page; if a reader stays on a single page, the visit is given a 0 visit length (no matter how long the reader lingers on that page).
From what I am told, Alexa uses a more sophisticated aproach in computing its Time on Site metric, which it measures over rolling weekly, monthly, and three-month periods. Here are the three-month Time on Site data for the 26 of the Top 35 Law Prof blogs by traffic as measured by Alexa:
Blog | Time on Site | Traffic Rank | |
1 | 3.47 | 2 | |
2 | 3.02 | 26 | |
3 | 2.59 | 3 | |
4 | 2.55 | 10 | |
5 | 2.48 | 9 | |
6 | 2.40 | 8 | |
7 | 2.06 | 13 | |
8 | 1.92 | 23 | |
9 | 1.84 | 20 | |
10 | 1.78 | 7 | |
11 | 1.77 | 34 | |
12 | 1.59 | 12 | |
13 | 1.58 | 6 | |
14 | 1.57 | 21 | |
15 | 1.55 | 15 | |
16 | 1.50 | 5 | |
17 | 1.50 | 24 | |
18 | 1.49 | 17 | |
19 | 1.41 | 11 | |
20 | 1.38 | 27 | |
21 | 1.04 | 30 | |
22 | 1.03 | 19 | |
23 | 1.03 | 16 | |
24 | 1.03 | 28 | |
25 | 0.80 | 14 | |
26 | 0.19 | 1 |
