12% of web visits now coming through planetlotus.org

March 29 2008

In just a few short months, PlanetLotus.org has become the second-most popular referrer to edbrill.com...second only to Google.  More than 12% of all web visits to this site originate from planetlotus.org.  Interestingly, of those, only 6% over the last month were brand-new visits to edbrill.com -- thus meaning that the traffic coming in from PlanetLotus was already familiar with this blog, and is using the Planet site as a replacement way to navigate.

For me, that replacement is a substitute for having 200+ RSS feeds tracking the Lotus community.  I would much rather open a regular old browser window a few times a day to check up on what's new across the community versus using a feed for each site.  I think feeds were valuable when there were fewer bloggers and/or people writing more often.  But with most Lotus community blogs getting updated an average of once a day, a feed that polls every 30 minutes, with topics that may or may not be of interest, is less useful.

Over the last 30 days, here are the the top referring sites sending readers to edbrill.com.  The first three are all at least 3% of overall web visits...the remaining seven are less than 1% each.

  1. Google -- 50% new visitors
  2. PlanetLotus -- 12% new visitors
  3. IBM.com (Lotus websites and developerWorks Lotus blogs and forums) -- 20% new visitors
  4. vowe.net -- 8.5% new visitors
  5. news.com -- 93% new visitors
  6. bloglines.com -- 26% new visitors
  7. Yahoo -- 61% new visitors
  8. groklaw.net -- 94% new visitors
  9. robweir.com -- 65% new visitors
  10. alanlepofsky.net -- 21% new visitors

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Blogging  Add/View Comments [5]

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  1. 1  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 3/30/2008 2:10:08 PM

    That's not really surprising, or is it? Most of the people who would know planetlotus.org would also know EdBrill.com. I am surprised that there are ANY new visitors from my site.

    I agree that PL allows you to follow way more sites than subscribing to all their feeds. I would certainly like a little bit more context, like the first 10 words of a posting.

  1. 2  Bill Geimer  | 3/31/2008 12:54:08 PM

    Just an FYI: Twitter.com is considered a social/dating site and blocked by JPMorgan Chase. Not sure if anybody else is having an trouble with your recent change of location services. Its not exactly an organizational choice, just part of a broad spectrum of sites inherited with the web proxy software used.

  1. 3  Glen http://thesalmonfarm.org | 3/31/2008 9:44:03 PM

    Personally, Feed readers and "aggregators" are getting so smart, they are my preferred interface. It easy to get more than "10 words" and there is seldom a good reason to have reader looking every 30 minutes with (1) the blog gets one or two posts a day and (2) I only look at the feed reader two or three times a day.

  1. 4  Martijn de Jong  | 4/1/2008 4:18:57 AM

    I couldn't agree less on the feed readers. If I would have to use the "regular old browser" to view your site daily I would simply forget. Now I get an unobtrusive popup at the right bottom of my screen telling me of new articles all around the world and if it sounds interesting I'll go and take a look.

    You might think that if you update your site daily, people should come look daily, but as you don't update your site daily with a subject that interests me I don't see the need.

  1. 5  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 4/1/2008 2:00:20 PM

    @4 that's not what I said. I said that PlanetLotus is taking the place of the RSS feeds for these particular blogs. Since it is guaranteed that I will want to read -someone- in the Lotus community every single day, using PlanetLotus to accomplish this is really helpful. I was not at all saying anything negative about using feeds.