Results of the Experiment
On Wednesday I turned comments off for the day, to see what impact it might have on stats if you didn’t have people reloading pages to see the latest comments.
The number of unique visits was totally unaffected (in fact above the average for the week), which is good as it shows that the stats package is not counting as a new visit, people returning to the site many times in one day.
The number of pageviews per visit though dropped from around 20,000 pageviews against a weekday average of 27,000.
So the very tenative conclusion I draw is that the comments don’t affect the number of visits greatly, but are responsible for around 25% of the pageviews.
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January 21st, 2008 at 11:31 am
The trial is perhaps too short to draw any conclusion about number of visits.
Be interesting to know what happened to No Right Turn stats before and after blocking comments. As that would be a roughly equivalent format to your own.
January 21st, 2008 at 11:41 am
What it may suggest is that the “effectiveness” of any blog is not measured by comments.
The influence of blogs in shaping public and parliamentry opinion cannot be denied however. It may be impossible to survey exactly what influence they carry, except through the occasional hat tips from MP’s, during debates, to bloggers. Asking MP’s which bloggers they read or agree with is doomed to return a worthless result from the start.
January 21st, 2008 at 5:27 pm
With the weekend just been the exception, I very rarely bother to read the comments, let alone make one myself. Its full of childish diatribe that makes me cringe, quite embarrassing for the commentators. Kiwiblog is not called “David Farrars Troll Farm” for nothing!!
On a more positive note, I rarely miss a posting from DPF on the main blog page. Kiwiblog is one of my browser start up tabs.
January 21st, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I enjoyed the moratorium greatly. It was liberating to deal with the actual post and not have to witness others jacking off to the inane diversionary tactics that some posters seem to delight in.
It made me think a bit more about what I wrote and encouraged me to polish my prose until it positively glistened, no doubt much to the chagrin of the less gifted or erudite lefties. (ie all of ‘em)
Or something.
January 21st, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I think removing comments would hurt the site in terms of unique visitors in the long run – but not in the short term. It takes a while to break a habit of visiting a blog but this sort of blog would be much less satisfying if you could not make a comment (regardless of whether you respond to those comments personally). At least some people would probably feel that way too.
January 21st, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Yeah, something like that Lee
(Actually you’re one of the more erudite and reasoned people here, but don’t tell the rest of ‘em I said that).
David, you should no better than to extrapolate from a small samplesize (i.e. one day). I suspect most people rely on the page reloading after they’ve had their say rather than sitting there hitting refresh (I know that’s what I do) and then come back later to see if / how the debate has progressed (flame wars between certain people of whom the less said the better excepted of course).
Much as I enjoy your posts there are commenters whose views I find equally stimulating and my reason for visiting is as much to read their take on events as yours. And by no means all of them are people with whose views I generally agree.
I think you’re to be commended for allowing, even encouraging, such a diversity of views – it’s what makes Kiwiblog a must-read for someone such as myself who doesn’t particularly trust any of the buggers and wants to engage with both sides of the debate rather than watch comments which don’t conform to the prevailing paradigm vanish into the ether.
January 21st, 2008 at 8:11 pm
There are a variety of personalities that feature here too. I often skip basically anything written by some (life is too short) but always read some others. Some posters – well I can see why they think they are right, – but still know they are wrong, while some don’t give toss about right or wrong, they just want to disrupt. I imagine them as the nerdy ones at the back of the class who can’t get girl-friends.
Some of them I like even though I disagree with their world view and vice-versa, some of them I think are more than one person (or a schizophrenic) Sam Dixon/Robert Owen/BeShakey come to mind, while some of them I am basically fond of even though i can’t understand a word they are saying sometimes.
It’s a minestrone.
Rex you are the (legal) herbs.