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 25 of the Top 35 Law Prof blogs by traffic as measured by Alexa:
Blog Time on Site Traffic Rank 1 4.19 2 2 3.90 10 3 3.39 26 4 2.63 8 5 2.38 21 6 2.15 3 7 2.00 9 8 1.95 7 9 1.78 4 10 1.76 13 11 1.66 14 12 1.65 6 13 1.55 16 14 1.48 19 15 1.47 17 16 1.44 28 17 1.41 11 18 1.39 5 19 1.32 23 20 1.31 12 21 1.31 15 22 1.15 34 23 1.01 24 24 0.77 27 25 0.36 1
