Despite outward appearances of fluffiness, I am, in my heart, an unreconstructed believer in measurement. Some might disagree with me, and that's ok !
I'm trying to get my head around some measures for engagement, and am interested in seeing if anyone has some numbers for page views versus comments . Ultimately I think it would be interesting to see if there was some median value, and then to start analysing blogs which "over" or "under" perform compared to this medium, and see why.
Now, I know, really I do, that blogs that differ from my golden average aren't really under or overperforming - so please ignore the judgemental type language. There will also be massive differences depending on the sector, internal versus external, length of time blogging, frequency of blogging, whether comments are turned on or off (!), amount of spam allowed to fester per post, etc etc. But, right now, I have absolutely no sense of any of these numbers beyond the meager numbers of scale|free, where for the record, I'm getting 1 comment per 137 page views, and would like to know more.
Post here or trackback, and I'll summarise later for all to view. Please remember that this isn't a study, and has no significance beyond getting a massively biased gut-feel (if I get a response at all !) of this, very singular, metric.
Ta !
And then, of course, once you have these figures, you'll need to evaluate the "quality" of the comments as well - because, as I'm sure you know, it's about more than just numbers.
Do the comments contribute to the discussion in any real way, for instance, or are they just cheerleading? Both types of comments are valid, in my opinion, but very different.
Hi Stuart,
Not sure I totally follow what you mean.
Of course I agree that it's about more than numbers - getting this information would only be another datapoint and viewed in isolation could easily be misleading.
And re comments as cheerleading - do you mean in general ? It often depends on the site - look at Signal vs Noise - a huge comment thread (http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/france_at_night.php?185#comments) on a controversial posting about the riots in France. Very little cheerleading there...
I think what I really wanted to say, but was too tired last night to express clearly, is that there's a world of difference between comments that offer real opinions, either in agreement or disagreement, and those that often serve little more purpose than to drive traffic to the commenter's site.
(To be honest, even I'm not sure what I was getting at with the cheerleading stuff ...)
The post you link to is a good example of a post where the comments add real value, and are sometimes even more interesting than the original post.
Hi Anu
Really interested to see how this turns out. Me, have 1 per 146, though what I haven't factored in is my own responses to people commenting.
Suppose you could also do number of different commenters per page views?
Thanks Piers.
Good point re one's own responses - that's definitely something to consider.
I'm wondering if these metrics should be time based (like technorati and pubsub rankings seem to be now) - ie is activity that happened a year ago relevant now ?