Real time traffic estimation, or "real time web analytics," is where a software program updates estimates of such common web traffic measures as unique visitors and pageviews. A good system can do this within four to six minutes of the installation of a blog post.
This blogger discovered how useful real time blogging was almost by accident. Yobie Benjamin, who's a fellow CityBrights blogger at SFGate.com, turned me on to something he helped develop called in an effort to track down an Internet stalker. Yobie shut down his system, but I happened to find another one that had a license to use his software. It's called Clicky.com. But a month after installing the code, Click.com became a tool for another effort: real time blogging.
Real Time Blogging, or "Trend Blogging" is developing a blog post in response to what the top searches are on a service like Bing X-Rank or Google Trends. Using real time traffic reporting allows you to see how your blog traffic responds to your posts ability to "hit" the keywords people are using to find out about a subject in a search.
I started doing this last November of 2009 and just after the discovery that I generated 1.1 million unique visitors at SFGate.com for the month of October 2009. By November, that increased to 1.5 million, and in December, 2.2 million unique visitors. From October to May of 2010, I've generated over 7.7 million visitors at SFGate.com.
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| Jesse James and Michelle "Bombshell" McGee |
Sandra Bullock and Jesse James ruled Google Trends; I wanted to join them.
On that day I wrote six blog posts on the news, and amassed over 280,000 unique visitors before 4 PM EDT, according to SFGate.com staff. I blogged between 7 AM and 11 AM EDT, and by my later estimation, generated over $500 in ad revenue for SFGate.com for that one day, none of it I saw but I helped save some jobs (more about that later in this post).
But the flip side of that, is my videos, even though the latest one wasn't about Bullock at the time, realized a dramatic view increase. All of this was a fantastic development for Real Time Blogging. There was just one problem: Clicky.com.
Clicky.com MAJOR FAIL
Clicky.com stopped tracking traffic data at 4:13 PM EDT, and at 102,000 visitors. In fact, the traffic report updates were slower and slower, until by that time they were a full three hours behind real time. Without an accurate real time traffic gauge, I had stopped blogging around 11 EDT, as stated, really to let the system catch up. But the graph reporting dashboard was literally stuck in place.
This email I received from Clicky.com support explains what happened:
Your site is normally fine but the spikes that you have are HUGE. Not just today but every couple weeks you have a gigantic spike. This one does look to be your biggest yet. You currently have 4400 users on your site at once. We're just absolutely not designed for that level of traffic occurring on a single site. The server is processing the backlog but it's falling further and further behind real time because this is just too much. Your site is currently accounting for almost 50% of the total traffic being logged to your site's database server. Each server is allocated around 8000 sites.
That means your site is logging as much traffic as the other 7,999 sites on the same server put together, and your spike is affecting the other 7,999 sites on this server.
So I'm sorry to say, I don't think we'll be able to track your site anymore. I had to disable it for now so that the server can catch back up.
We can handle sites up to 500,000 daily page views, but that's assuming that traffic is spread out somewhat evenly throughout the day. Your traffic comes in huge spikes in just an hour or two, which doesn't work very well with our service.
I'd recommend checking out chartbeat.com. They don't have nearly as many features as we do but they handle higher traffic and they are real time.
For me that was a major blow. The information on my impact on Clicky.com was new and surprising. What I didn't get was why they didn't try and work with me, upgrading me to another service level?
So, Real Time Blogging hit a misstep. Fortunately, it was a temporary one.
Enter Worldlogger.com
I happened on Worldlogger.com after just searching around and evaluating different services. For all of it's poor customer service, Clicky.com's dashboard was terrific. So that became my model for the next service to use. I did investigate Chartbeat.com but I did not like their dashboard layout. I don't want dials and numbers; I want graphs and numerical charts and keyword readouts. Worldlogger.com had none of that. At first.
What Worldlogger.com did have and has is a team of people who really want to help you. They are the direct opposite of Clicky.com from a customer service perspective. But the design wasn't what I wanted; Worldlogger took my input and those of others to make a terrific interface. It was lacking in one area at the time: keyword reporting.
Which words are causing what level of traffic at what time is a critical part of Real Time Blogging. Worldlogger lacked that. Even with that, Worldlogger's people were so incredible to work with, I stuck with the service as they were constantly improving it.
Focus Turns To Zennie62.com
About two months later I refocused on what had been a year-long process: getting Zennie62.com on Google News. The argument I made to Google execs was that aside from meeting their basic requirements, all of my blog posts on SFGate.com started at Zennie62.com. That realization sealed the deal.
Then, Blogger announced Real Time Traffic Stats and the new course for Zennie62.com was set.
My objective with Zennie62.com and my new Georgia-based company Zennie62Media.com is to show that a worthy competitor to blog sites like The Huffington Post and PerezHilton.com can be created using the Blogspot.com platform. There a lot of incorrect assumptions about Blogspot.com that Zennie62.com's growth can help eliminate. Plus, I want to be able to capture that $500 per day of revenue (when it happens) for my media site.
SFGate.com and The SeattlePI.com are great websites, but the fact is what I'm doing is light years ahead of what's being done on those sites and elsewhere.
Consider entering a blog post with a photo from a cell phone at a Cal Football game, then having that blog post hit Google News, Twitter, and Facebook minutes later, all while being at the game and not in the press box. That happened Saturday and here's the post. Real Time Blogging goes mobile.
The Future Is Not For Everyone
Real Time Blogging is not for everyone. Journalists will hate it, and some who are aware of what I do already dislike it. But the bottom line is the revenue returns are better than anything news websites are doing now.
The future of media is Real Time Blogging. It can also save investigative journalism by generating revenue and eyeballs for it.
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