Should I be excited, delighted, elated or just plain fed up? I don’t know.
Yesterday, almost exactly 24 hours ago, I published the post about Money for Old Cars and went to the Alphainventions site straight afterwards to do the business there, as described in my previous post. Normally, by doing that, I could expect to get perhaps 40-60 additional views at this blog over the following 24 hours. Yesterday was different. Within about an hour I had 200 views, which reminded me that I had not yet written a post about Alphainventions though I had been using their service (when I remembered) for some time.
So I wrote and published the post there and then, again visiting the Alphainventions site afterwards to follow the usual procedure. During the next hour, up to midnight, a further 200 views were added to my total. Naturally I was pleased about all those views and hoped that some of the “visitors” would become regulars. Beyond that, I thought no more about it and went to bed.
Imagine my surprise when the numbers of views were increasing still, and into the thousands, when I looked this morning. Now, however, I was not so happy.
I have been blogging more or less regularly, but not especially frequently, for about a year. In that time my total views had arrived at 8,000, there were 110 posts, and 375 approved comments. That was 24 hours ago. I now have 3 more posts (including this one), 2 additional comments (one from a new visitor) and, wait for it… … 15,303 views.
What I would like to know is, why did well over 7,000 views produce only one comment? It doesn’t make sense. What are these “views”? Are they real people just like my regular visitors? Or did that amazing increase in views include some WWW wizardry of a sort that I don’t begin to understand (like “pings” and “RSS feeds” and the like) but which is not real visitors to the site at all?
I have emailed Alphainventions requesting an explanation. I hope to receive a reply soon and until then I will reserve judgement.
Just Williams
Just Williams 
So far, I have had only 1200 views with AI on my best day. But what I think is going on is that maybe the number of people who know enough to pause the presentation of blogs number in the relative few. Then, at least for me, the pauses it makes on its own are so short that sometimes I don’t actually stop on the blog I want. Most people like me will sift through as many as 50 blogs (with many repeats) before I see one I am interested in. In the meantime, each blog presented to me got 1 hit it didn’t have before, resulting in an inflated number of hits. At least you cann be reasonably assured that a human on the other end saw your blog. Whether they cared enough to comment or were interested in your article is a whole other thing. That’s my theory.
I haven’t figured out what’s in it for them. I showed up on their site one day through no doing of mine, and got a few hits but nothing to write home about. I haven’t bothered going through all the rigamarole you do after you create a post yet, although I did try registering my blog at the http://www.condron.us site, and still get the occasional hit from it but again, nothing much. There, maybe mentioning them in the comment will get you on their radar as well 😉
So I have been wondering much of the same about all of this….tonight I have arrived at your blog via Alpha Inventions and I am commenting! I also just wrote a post about this as well….http://morethanafewthoughts.typepad.com/jane_boyds_weblog/2009/03/does-interaction-come-from-alpha-inventions-hits-we-will-see.html
Hello boydwfl, I have looked at your blog and it is becoming clearer that there are a few “real” visitors among all the new “views”. There had to be a few. However, my stats will not mean the same any more. Whereas previously I could judge the popularity of a topic on which I had posted by the numbers of views for that post (short-term and longer term), now the figures seem likely to be distorted depending on how much Alphainventions is involved at the time. Shame.
Strider – I have been thinking along similar lines. It’s those seemingly “inflated” numbers that worry me.
Digital Dame – whereas normally I might have 20 views by 10am on a good day (according to my WordPress stats), today I had 3,500. It really will be interesting to get to the bottom of this if and when Alphainventions reply to my email. Will post about it again in a few days one way or the other.
Our blog (http://www.practicallysisters.wordpress.com) is brand spankin’ new…not long enough to “work out the kinks”, let alone draw a decent readership, but we’re trying. 🙂 When our hits mysteriously jumped from 9 to 71 in one post and about an hour, I emailed my co-writer excitedly wondering what in the world she did! She was just as surprised as me and we determined that this must have been some type of free trial advertising to get us to pay the 10 bucks/month to get on alphainventions permenantly.
I spent a little time on there trying to figure out what the heck was going on and I realized the kind of hits I was getting were not the kind I would want. These people were seeing so many blogs in such a short time that it wasn’t doing me or them any good. One blog did catch my eye (http://morethanafewthoughts.typepad.com/jane_boyds_weblog/2009/03/results-of-alpha-inventions-experiment.html) because it mentioned alphainventions and from her blog, I ended up at yours. From the looks of it, everyone else is just as confused as I am! 🙂
it’s all about the comments, the interaction, engaging the readers.
not page hits.
I know this and it does not stop me from looking at my stats and screaming inside; “you have got to be kidding me” and then I find myself using AI too bump up the hits and hence my pride.
AI is a short circuit approach I believe. But there are some benefits – like one or two real readers like boydwfl. Yet 10,000 page hits is not an indication of success, a 1000 comments would be.
Phill
[twitter: http://twitter.com/phillipgibb%5D
[blog: http://synapticlight.com/%5D
interesting comments form all of you.
I only found this blog and Philip Gibbs, because you saw a post I wrote about AI.
As i noted in a comment on Philip’s blog my little AI experiment generated significant extra visits, real visits according to Sitemeter with substantial additional page views.
Comments, now there is the thing.
Yet have now left 3 comments here at justwilliams.
Hear from you soon guys
Thanks for all your comments. I have read them with interest and also read relevant posts on your blogs. I continue to wait for a reply from Alphainventions to my email of March 14th and my comment on their site on March 16th both of which simply enquired what was the nature of the 17,000+ “hits” that I received on this blog over the March 13th-16th period. Not an unreasonable question I think but as each day passes, the prospect of receiving a reply diminishes. I will post on this topic again in a day or two.
I have to add that I only got to your blog thru the AI aggregator, then chose to stop the presentation, and leave a comment. So, it is not always true that “nobody” leaves a comment. I did, on your blog.
Alphainventions in my opinion gives quick pageviews to your site, not bonafide readers.
Being a hobbyist, I have no serve advertisers or my ego with page views.
Nice thing about being a hobbyist blogger, is only having to worry about content, and not audience size. In some ways AI audience acquisition mechanisms give some bloggers a false sense of purpose.
In my mind, comments are platinum stuff, and only if they are not spam. Sudden page spikes are really nothing to me. I would rather go long and get one good reader than alot of nebulous comments. Tom my knowledge, WordPress don’t seem to have TSR (time spent reading) metrics, which can really say more than pages views in someways.
You know I never really thought of “time spent reading” statistics, but that would be really great. Especially since newer readers are generally hesitant to dive in and leave comments. We have been having some random unexplained spikes in page views recently too. Normally, we can see exactly where each hit comes from, but yesterday we had roughly 100 unexplained hits. For a tiny blog like ours (www.practicallysisters.wordpress.com) 100 hits is a lot!
In more mellow moments, when not ranting about the destruction of my blog stats, I can accept that it is fun to play with the likes of AlphaInventions and Condron.us and try to figure out exactly what it is that they do. Thanks for your comments.