Subscriber and Commenter Statistics
A couple days ago I decided that I need to set a goal for how big of a traffic base I need before I can add another blog. I decided the number of feed subscribers I have and the ave. number of comments I get per post would be a good way to quantify that. Since I don’t really know what would be some good numbers to shoot for I decided I would go and see what some other people have to help make an estimate.
Comments: (ave. per day for month of April)
Dr. Val and The Voice of Reason: 2.87
Sparkplug CEO: 21.59
Eye on DNA: 5.05
Genetics and Health: .57
GenBetween: 5.13
Successful Blog: 23.02
Aetiology: 18.27
Caroline Middlebrook: 34
Subscribers:
Dr. Val and The Voice of Reason: Bloglines: 29
Sparkplug CEO: Bloglines: 232 FeedBurner: 1763
Eye on DNA: Bloglines: 40 FeedBurner: 659
Genetics and Health : Bloglines: 50
GenBetweenBloglines: 24
Successful Blog Bloglines: 156
Aetiology: Bloglines: 42
Caroline Middlebrook: Bloglines: 318 FeedBurner: 2100
Problogger: Bloglines: 840 FeedBurner: 46940
After collecting that much data, I got kind of bored. Counting and averaging comments was rather tedious. I can’t say that my numbers are 100% correct either.
One thing I noticed right off is that a high number of subscribers doesn’t necessarily correlate to a high number of comments. And whether or not blogs seem successful to me doesn’t necessarily correlate to a high number of comments or subscribers.
At any rate, I think an average of 10-15 comments a day would be a good number to shoot for before thinking about adding another blog. 15 would be much better, but I include 10, because I can’t even imagine getting that much based on where I am now. I’ve been quite disappointed that I haven’t had more comments in the last few days. I’ve worked really hard on the posts I’ve written - but I guess no one is going to comment if they don’t know it exists.
I think 1000 subscribers seem reasonable to shoot for for Feedburner. Bloglines seems harder to go by - I wonder if less people use it now and maybe newer blogs are less likely to have as many people subscribing through it. Maybe 100-150 would be good. Again, my subscriber numbers are pathetic at this point.
So that is my goal - unless of course I modify it sometime - I will try to get 1000 Feedburner subscribers and around 10-15 ave. per post in six months.
on April 24th, 2008 at 2:14 am
Interesting data! I didn’t know what my average number of comments was! I’m not sure what your goal is exactly here but you sound like you are in a mindset that I used to be in where you base your decision about something on some arbitrary number. I remember saying to myself, “I’m not taking up karate until I can run for 10 minutes non-stop”. These arbitrary numbers are usually a stalling tactic on our part. What I would suggest instead is that every week or so just ask yourself if you feel the time is right to start another blog. If you feel uneasy about it then that’s a no, so wait another week. At some point the idea will feel good - that’s when you do it.
on April 25th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Interesting exercise! Just to let you know that at http://www.geneticsandhealth.com
I get a low number of comments per blog per day but around 50 -100 emails (excluding spam) a day
through my personal email attached to the blog. My readers know they will get a response this way and
quite often their requests and queries are personal and they don’t want everyone to know their business.
A few of my blogs have creasted a significant number of comments because of the contentiousness
of the article. Trouble is, then you get the trouble makers who like nothing better than to ruin healthy debate!
on April 28th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Caroline - my goal is to eventually have a small blog network on the ideasforwomen.com domain. I’m following steps Darren and David outlined in post of theirs. Darren suggested waiting 6 months before adding another one and to make sure to have a “good profile and traffic base”. Thing is - I don’t get that much traffic to the one blog - there would be no point in adding another - no one would know about it to read it. Plus, I will likely need to pay another blogger to do the writing, and I can’t afford it yet.
Elaine - that’s a lot of emails! I barely find the time to answer the ones I get now.