Traffic

I am not competitive, but I like comparisons. How is my little corner of the blog universe doing? Why am I getting all this traffic? Are people actually reading me? Are all these clicks just random clicks from autobots of some sort? For most of October, I wrote only two posts, but two days before the end of the month it had been my biggest month (click–can’t figure out how to render full-size).

That’s not impossible; my essays are often discovered after the fact. Mine is not a time dependent blog linking in news of the day. Still, I wonder.

So I figured out how to use Alexa, a little (click):

Alexa says that rankings are kind of sketchy until you’re under 100,000. Well. Diane Ravitch’s ranking is something like 161K. Education Excellence–the website, not the blog–is something like 220K. Diane is the only individual education blogger I could find with really high rankings; I didn’t include her on this because the scale eradicated all the other differences.

This is primarily a comparison of my site to those of education policy wonks and reporters, with the exception of Dan Meyer. Most individual teacher bloggers I looked up were well below my ranking; everyone I could think of was in the 2 million range or not ranked at all. I couldn’t look up individual edweek bloggers, so I have no idea how Sawchu, Hess, Gerwitz or Cody do, for example. Alexander Russo’s entire site (scholastic administrator) came in below a million—I didn’t include it because I’m not sure how his blog relates to everything else. Daniel Willingham’s site numbers are for everything, but I’m figuring his blog gets most of the traffic.

I can’t figure the whole thing out—it’s clear I improved a lot from a low point in May, but May was a huge month for me. June and July were big dropoffs. It’s also clear I ended “up”–if I’d done this a few weeks ago, I’d have been slightly below some of the bloggers I’m now above. Larry Cuban has been my own benchmark for a year; I used another site (Quantcast, I think?) and because we are both on wordpress comparisons were pretty easy. He’s usually right above me; it’s a fluke that right now I’m ranked slightly higher than he is.

However, I thought this was a helpful graphic. I’m not imagining things; Alexa thinks I’m doing pretty well in a relative sense. I mean, there’s really major bloggers who are in the same million rankings with me! And I do it for free. Kudos to Joanne Jacobs, who I’ve been reading for years and does it all on her own. Dan Meyer, also doing it all by himself, as a teacher no less, has great numbers, too.

Any ideas? Other sites to check out? Or do your own comparison.