So apparently, I’m a b-list blogger nowadays:

If you’re an average A-list blogger (those getting at least 15,000 hits per day), your 150,000 40-second visitors in aggregate are spending 1700 hours per day reading and commenting on your blog. The average B-list blogger (those getting at least 1,000 hits per day) is getting 62 hours per day of 90-second-per-visit aggregate reader attention, the average C-list (150-1,000 hits-per-day) blogger 13 hours per day of aggregate reader attention, and the average up-and-coming (50-150 hits-per-day) blogger 2.5 hours per day.

floor-9.com pulls in just over 102,000 hits monthly (90-day average), or about 3400 hits daily. The site sees an average traffic increase of about 43% monthly, which definitely ranks it in the “fast-growing” category. But as big as those numbers sound, they’re not really very impressive. Consider that a single visit might generate dozens or hundreds of hits; one hit does not equal one visit. Hit counts are regarded as pretty worthless in all but a few specific applications (banner impressions, for one). In fact, using standard HTML, there’s no sure-fire way to get an accurate visit count. There is no shortage of complex algorithms designed to closely estimate your actual traffic, but none of them are 100% accurate. In short, hits are worthless.

There’s another statistic, commonly referred to as “visits”, which is substantially more accurate. Essentially, “visits” looks at the number of times a single IP calls a page from your website within a pre-determined period of time (12 hours, in my case). The idea is that someone who visits my site and reads every single page from top to bottom generates the same number of visits as someone who just hits the front page and leaves: one single visit. Although they’re not 100% accurate, visits give a more meaningful way to compare your traffic against other sites. In my case, floor-9.com averages about 6600 visits every month (90-day average again), or about 220 visits daily.

Final point being, that’s pretty cool. I always refer to floor-9 as a small site with little-to-no traffic. I guess now I can upgrade myself to “medium-to-little”. Either way, it’s a long way away from the early days of being hosted on a friend’s computer and pulling 1200 hits per month.