Do lots of people really read the A-list tech blogs? Do they get a lot of traffic compared to, say, B-list knitting blogs? Strangely, the answers seem to be “Mostly, no” and “Mostly, no”. I’ll show you why I think so! (If you want to skip all the words, just scroll down and look at the graphs and tables.) 
Background:
I’ve been blogging for a long time — about knitting. So I managed to miss some heated debates over “quality vs non-quality blogs”, “A-list vs D-list blogs” and “high traffic vs low-traffic mommie blogs” when those debates broke out on the tech blogs back in — oh January? Or was it March?
Recently, I discovered the techno-island part of the blogosphere, and learned that certain blogs are considered to be on “The A-list”. Others are not. Some people seem to assume that the “A-list” blogs are “high quality”, get the most traffic, drive opinion or somehow “deserve” to be paid for sponsored ads or something; while “D-list blogs” are none of these things. Others disagree. (Read 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8.)
I can’t measure who “deserves” to be paid for blogging. But, being the quantitative sort, I wanted to compare how much traffic the A-list blogs get compared to my B-list knitting blog. Now, it’s hard to make a decent comparison. To avoid serious distortions, I decided to compare my blog traffic to single author blogs not sharing a domain name with a forum or bulletin board. Then, I moved on to my analysis.
Analysis
My first step was to try to figure out which blogs are on the “A-list”. Since I’m new to reading blogs in the whole “SEO/ marketing/ IT” area, I had to read a bunch of blogs to try to discern which are “A-list” blogs. I finally decided to compare my traffic to these blogs:
- Darren Rowse of Pro Blogger; I’d heard of him before I began trying to monetize my blog.
- Jason Calacanis ; I read about him at Pay Per Post’s blog.
- Robert Scoble of Scobleizer; I read on other blogs that he’s on the A list.
- Jeff Jarvis, of Buzz Machine.
- John Chow,; I read he’s offering to ‘no follow’ a bloggers comments if the blogger forks over $10 a month and
- Michael Arrington of Crunch Notes; I read his discussion of PPP yesterday on TechCrunch.
Fully aware that it’s nearly impossible to obtain good third party traffic estimates, I looked up the traffic on three services: Quantcast, Compete and Alexa. I also looked up everyone’s Google page rank by visiting the index page of their blog using the Alexa plugin. I then compared their blog statistics to those of my blog:
Results
How did the various A list blogs compare to my B list knitting blog?
Well, let’s look at the graphics! I can only show 5 blogs on a Compete graphic, so I included the five that are currently getting the most traffic according to Compete.
Above, you can see that “The Knitting Fiend”, was supposedly outperforming every single one of the “A list” tech blogs during winter (AKA, the knitting season), but my traffic has dipped during summer (AKA, the gardening season.) Pro-blogger clearly outperforms me now. I’m edged out by Robert Scoble and Jeff Jarvis; I beat John Chow by a small amount. We’ll have to wait and see how we all compare once we’re back in knitting season!
Now let’s look at Quantcast traffic estimates. Once again, I show only the blogs with the top five traffic rankings on the graph below:
Well, that doesn’t look so great for my knitting blog!
My traffic, indicated by the blue line, flirts with the bottom two lines indicating traffic at BuzzMachine and Calcanis.com. Pro-blogger, shown in red, gets so much more traffic than anyone else that you can’t really tell which of the lower three blogs on the graph get the most traffic. (Of those actually showing, mine is getting the least.)
Oh, but I bet those of you who can count are wondering, “Didn’t she say she was showing 5 blogs on that graph?” I am showing the five highest traffic rank blogs based on Quantcast data!
Quantcast seems to have trouble with blogs it considered “low traffic” and won’t plot their traffic. The fourth highest traffic A-list tech blog on my list blog dropped off! It turns out that if you get less traffic than I do, Quantcast won’t even plot your data.
How about the other rankings? I’ll wrap up now and post a table showing everyone’s current traffic rankings on Quantcast, Compete, Alexa and Google. The word “Count” is used to indicate actual traffic; higher is better. “Rank” indicates a rank given by the ranking tool; for Quantcast and Alexa, low ranks are better. With Google, a rank of “10″ is perfect; a rank of “0″ is bad.
Here are all the ranks:
| Blog | Quantcast Count (Rank) | Compete Count | Alexa Rank | PR |
| Darren Rowse | 140,514 (26,662) | 28,257 | 2777 | 5 |
| Jason Calacanis | 58,890 (44,839) | 12,295 | 14,814 | 7 |
| Robert Scoble | 12,426 (118,832) | 18,513 | 11,584 | 7 |
| Jeff Jarvis | 11,603 (125,878) | 13,756 | 47,776 | 7 |
| John Chow | 8,094 (169,791) | 12,845 | 2,535 | 6 |
| Michael Arrington | <2000 (658,150) | 6,182 | 55,470 | 7 |
What do we see?
The “A-list” tech-bloggers all have higher Google page ranks than my knitting blog. This isn’t too surprising. After all, even high traffic knitting blogs rarely get coverage in newspapers. Most knitting blogs supressed trackbacks back in the days of trackback spam, and they never turned them back on. In any case, knitting bloggers don’t linking each other as most other bloggers. Knitting blogs generally focus on showing everyone what they knit- not having blog conversations with other bloggers. So, overall, the number of back links is low in the knitting-island of the blogosphere.
The “A-list” tech-bloggers have higher Alexa ranks than my B-list knitting blog. That’s also no surprise to a tech-blogger! After all, many, many tech-bloggers install Alexa tool bars; when they visit another tech-blog, they give it an Alexa boost. In contrast, knitters have often never heard of Alexa! In any case, Alexa is heavily gamed by tech-bloggers. I read a few articles describing how back in mid-April. I managed to get my Alexa to drop from around 500,000 to 162,555 in less than 2 months! The reality is my traffic has dropped a little- just as it does every summer! )
Yet despite the good Alexa and Google ranks which are so visible to surfers using the Alexa toolbar, Quantcast and Compete think some of the the “A-list” tech bloggers get traffic levels comparable to those of my “B-list” knitting blog. Who’d have expected this?
Conclusion
Now, I’m not saying these A-list tech blogs don’t get more traffic than my B-list knitting blog. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to learn every single one of these traffic rank tools is totally wrong.
Nevertheless, based on the third party ranking tools I can access easily, there is only one blog that clearly gets more traffic than “The Knitting Fiend”: Darren Rowse of Pro-Blogger. If I want advise on how to get traffic, I’ll ask him!
You can’t really compare traffic between blogs in different niches in this way.
Also significant, if you don’t install the Quantcast tracking code, the figures are useless.
If you do have it, it is not too far off Google Analytics and other tracking scripts, thus it has the potential, but as people don’t use it, it is almost worthless.
p.s. I would read through, because you got names muddled in a few places
You still have a Jeff Scoble
I do agree, and was agreeing with the same with Kat (another well known postie).
I have niche blogs that get more traffic, but certainly don’t generate as many links.
Work on ways to make your stats as public as possible, work on building up your subscribers.
One other thing, so some reason when I click a link to your knitting blog from here, I get a 403 error. When I click through from the homepage of the domain, it works fine.
Great comparison, though I can claim to have high traffic for my onw sites
I used to beat myself up trying to get my blog to be an A-list one. For a while, back when the war started, I even broke into the Top 10 of the “blogging ecosystem” on TruthLaidBear.com. I’m waaaay down from there now, even though incoming links have increased by 400% since then.
Why?
All of these companies have an interest in creating algorhythms that “diss” sites accustomed to being high ranking in their competitor’s algorhythms. The result is that, in order to get one’s site on, say, Alexa, one has to start using the Alexa toolbar. Voila - new authority for Alexa.
I believe one of your earlier commenters, Andy, pointed out the same thing with Qualcast.
After four years of doing this, I’ve simply decided to ignore all of the ranking systems that don’t directly impact my ability to earn money with sponsored entries. Which is not to say that I only post sponsored stuff now: I only post about 1 sponsored entry for every 4 or so posts now. But I do post at least a dozen entries a day.
That, I’ve found, tends to be what really separates the A-list bloggers: frequency.
these companies have an interest in creating algorhythms that “diss” sites accustomed to being high ranking in their competitor’s algorhythms. The result is that, in order to get one’s site on, say, Alexa, one has to start using the Alexa toolbar