Ranking NZ blogs with sitemeter data

There’s a school of thought that the only reliable way to rank blogs is by using actual sitemeter data for visits. Unfortunately, most blogs don’t make this information public. Perhaps if more did bloggers could compare their statistics with those for other sites or have a listed ranking. This would help their interpretation.

I have managed to identify 37 New Zealand blogs with public sitemeter stats, or who self report this information – mostly from Tumeke’s blog ranking reports (see nz blogosphere rankings : March 2009). So how do these sites rank amongst themselves? Have a look at the table below for the April ’09 data. And for those interested in comparing sitemeter data with the traditional blog ranking indices, and with the rankings of Tumeke, Halfdone and Open Parachute – look at my analysis below the table.

Update: Homepaddock has passed on (see Naked Stats) that her stats are also public so we now have 38 blogs on the list.

Visit rank	Name	April Visits
1	No Minister	31,251
2	No Right Turn	26964
3	The Dim-Post	23317
4	TUMEKE!	20696
5	The Inquiring Mind	19603
6	The Hand Mirror	15446
7	roarprawn	15062
8	The visible hand in economics	14616
9	MacDoctor Moments	11147
10	Homepaddock	10931
11	Hot Topic	9199
12	In a strange land	8915
13	Open Parachute	7131
14	Anti-Dismal	6705
15	Reading the Maps	6242
16	New Zealand Conservative	6,241
17	Halfdone	5316
18	Poneke’s Weblog	5215
19	MandM	4535
20	Canterbury Atheists	4505
21	Put ’em all on an island	3967
22	Workers Party	3656
23	The Fundy Post	3160
24	Socialist Aotearoa	2785
25	Liberation	2648
26	Capitalism is bad	2640
27	Hitting Metal With A Hammer	2566
28	Humanitarian Chronicle	2515
29	Put up thy Sword!	1990
30	Webweaver’s world	1628
31	dad4justice	1434
32	Samuel Dennis	1348
33	goNZo Freakpower Brains Trust	979
34	Aotearoa: a wider perspective	964
35	Ozymandias Warning	787
36	The Home Office	207
37	SageNZ	150
38	Clint Heine and Friends	17

Estimating visit numbers

Tumeke bases his ranking score on sitemeter data for visits, or (in most cases) an estimate of these. His estimate is based on Alexa Rank data (3 month average). So I have used a correlation analysis to judge how well Alexa Rank, and other common indices, predict the visit numbers for April ’09.

The results are summarised in the table below. These suggest that Alexa Rank and Technorati Rank explain 40% and 48% of the variation in visit numbers rerspectively. Both are better predictors than Alexa NZ Rank. However Google Reader Subscription Counts predicts equally well as Technorati Rank, and better than Alexa Rank. Unfortunately, fewer blogs are ranked by Technorati than Alexa which creates problems.

When the raw data is ranked (1-37, or 1-32 for Tehcnorati) for each blog I found Alexa Rank, Techorati Rank and Google Reader Subscription Counts would be equally predictive (about 50%) for ranking  visits.

	Raw Data	Rank numbers (1 -37)
Alexa Rank	40%*	49%
Alexa NZ Rank	35%*	40%
Technorati Rank (32 sites)	48% *	50%
Google reader	48%	50%

* Logarithmic relationship

Using published blog rankings

So how effective are the blog ranking systems used by Tumeke, HalfDone and Open Parachute in predicting ranking of sitemeter visit numbers? I have given estimates of the effectiveness for each system in the table below.

Although Tumeke’s data for April ’09 are not yet available it would clearly give the best estimate because it uses actual, or estimated, visit numbers. These have a big influence because they contribute the largest amount (80% on average) to the final score (ranking score = actual or estimated visits + Technorati Authority + average weekly posts + average weekly comments ).

However, the fact that visit numbers are estimated from Alexa Rank for most blogs means the actual predictive power of the final score is far lower than estimated from these 37 sites alone (54% compared with 79% for March data using the 28 sites for which sitemeter data was available).

Halfdone’s ranking score uses the formula Score = (Alexa Rank x Alexa NZ Rank)/Technorati Authority/1000.

The predictive power of Open Parachute’s aggregate ranking of the 4 ranking indices only is slightly better than the total aggregate ranking (11 indices).

System	Predictive power
Tumeke (stats)*	79%
Tumeke (Estimated)**	54%
HalfDone	52%
Open Parachute (total rank)	60%
Open Parachute (page rank)	63%

* March data using sitemeter data
** March data using Alexa Rank to estimate visits

I think there would be a lot of value in a blog ranking based on actual visit counts. The list above may encourage more NZ bloggers to allow public access to their stats.

On the other hand. I think there is value in having some idea of ranking based on other criteria such as links and RSS subscription counts. Different bloggers may be interested in different criteria for judging their performance.

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