All of this traffic talk and page numbers is interesting, but all of it seems to be flawed. I was just looking at some sites on Project Wonderful that say they have like umpteen billion pageviews for their ads, but if you check out the other data, things don't match up. Even some strips who were struggling for audience some time ago, have greater pageviews there than established strips.

It leads me to believe that some sites are being less than audience or using proxyhits to inflate that. Well, at least on ProjectWonderful, and hey, I guess it's working out great for them, but it ends up hurting the advertisers who think they're getting a good deal for 25 bucks a day or something. Strange.

Too bad Firefox or IE dont collect data to see how many sites are bookmarked or something

DJ Coffman- cartoonist

yirmumah.net - herobynight.com

I'm always happy to be linked, Xaviar, but one small complaint: your post reads like I was setting this up as the new Definite Top Rankings, when actually I was saying pretty much what YOU'RE saying, that there is no reliable system, and all this can produce is "the statistical equivalent of rumor." Those charts do indicate that Explosm.net is PROBABLY pretty popular, but not definitely, and not definitely more popular than Penny Arcade.

(But I would caution against making such judgments based on one's gut, too!)

I'm worried sick that people are gonna skip the point of that essay and go straight to the charts, but the alternative would be to tell people "I believe that these sites' wild performance variations mean that they'd never agree on any traffic relationships that are important to comics, but I'm not going to actually test my theory and show you the results or anything."

It's not an ideal test, to be sure. The best test would be against individual sites' results with Extreme Tracker, Google Analytics and Webtrends, but like I said, people have very good reasons not to be forthcoming with that information.

And DJ, I don't think proxyhits are aimed at PW, but I use Project Wonderful, and I do put the same banner ad at the top and bottom of my forum pages, so those get counted twice. I consider this ethical because the PW statistics are supposed to be AD-views, not PAGE-views, and because forum users tend to scroll from top to bottom, but I know not everyone observes that distinction.

Mind you, this sort of data is always always ALWAYS flawed. There is no perfect system, not from Diamond, not from Nielsen, not from nobody. But the flaws are still at a level for webcomics that is, to my mind, unacceptable. And yet, it sort of has to be acceptable, because except for the end of the piece, I don't have a really good answer for this problem. Maybe someone else does.

And maybe I should shut up now and let them talk about it. I'll still be reading, but I won't be posting here-- I've already written about 2,658 words on this, now it's your turn.

I know a diehard Xplosm fan and a diehard Penny Arcade fan. I can't use my personal knowledge of these two people to make a statistical analysis but from my perception of them- they are two very different types of fans.

-tony