Bugger. Blogging Bolt Better Than Most
Andrew Bolt writes today that his blog has attracted more than a million ‘page impressions’ during the last month.
Sad to say, it’s a big achievement in the Australian blogosphere. Maybe this is a testament to the Bolt-Blair bipolarity of the Australian right wing blogosphere, but despite his politics, Bolt deserves credit for this. Bolt is one of the few industrial media journalists that really ‘gets’ blogging. He doesn’t just engage in the comments, he integrates contributions from his readers in his posts, he posts to a blogging news cycle (ie multiple posts per day) and his posts are extremely link heavy. In short, he understands the norms of the medium; so full credit.
That being said, as I’ve written about here in the past, blogging seems to work better while you’re in opposition. In light of this I’d be interested to see the trend in Bolt’s audience growth since the election. It’s worth asking whether Bolt has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of John Howard losing office?
UPDATE: In more cheery news, Mark Bahnisch Kim writes at LP that in terms of page impressions Larvartus Prodeo attracted about 50% more traffic than Bolt last month (echoed by Mark in the comments below). Without the click through traffic from News.com.au or Bolt’s brand recognition THIS is a truly great achievement. Congratulations guys.
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August 1st, 2008 at 1:20 am
In July, Larvatus Prodeo got 1442702 page views. We topped one and a half million in May and June. “Page impressions” is advertising metric speak, and refers to the number of pages served, not the number of people reading a blog.
You’d get a better take on Bolt’s reach if he provided a figure on unique visitors.
August 1st, 2008 at 7:12 am
Great to hear Mark!
I did think Bolt’s use of ‘page impressions’ was a bit soft, but given that I was trying to give a MSM journo a wrap for adapting to the medium I thought I’d let it pass…
August 1st, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Tim, in the column Bolt subsequently wrote that you linked to he seems to imply that a million page impressions = a million people. Note that a number of people (including me) explained on his initial thread what it did and didn’t mean. We’re left with the usual Bolt hermeneutical circle - is the dude ignorant or mendacious?
August 1st, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Ps - re the ps - thanks!
August 1st, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Except I wrote the post so you may like to correct that.
August 1st, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Sorry Kim - Mark posted in the comments initially and then I saw the link coming through from LP and assumed it was him too - my bad. Corrected above.
Also - yes, there’s no way he can’t know that it’s not a million people by now - being more than a little misleading at this point.