Funny thing…Pam Geller is whining at her blog about the profile the Times did her the favor of publishing. She even says they lied about her.
Well, Pam is a liar herself…about her site stats. And the N.Y. Times took her word for it and published the following false statement:
Atlas Shrugs…gets about one million unique visitors a month…
I wonder what sort of due diligence the Times fact checkers did on that one.
Her claim struck me as awfully high so I started to do some research. Alexa ranks her site 23,000 in the world. My site is currently ranked around 150,000 and I get about 70-90,000 unique visitors a month. So I asked myself how can a blog ranked 23,000 get that many hits? It just didn’t ring true.
So I asked a reader with deep IT/SEO experience to help me pinpoint her monthly readership. This is what he came up with:
Geller’s claim of a million hits per month, as usual, is a lie. Her hit rates are half that. Her 90-day daily average is 17,334, which is 520,020 per month.
I did a comparison of several more websites using information on bizinformation.ca (which shows 90-day historical data) and the thing that really stands out is that external links really weight blog rankings. In other words, you’ve got to get more people linking to your website.
Geller uses advertisements from Newsmax to inflate her links. She has a lot of links from michellemalkin, little green footballs, jihad watch, pajamasmedia, fox news, and yid with lid. The demographics of all these are about the same: older, male, tea party.
Even if you use the more generous terms of Sitemeter, which I display here her best month in the past year doesn’t even reach 900,000 unique visits. Her average over that year is closer to 600,000+. So much for honesty.
Interestingly, Atlas Shrugged is ranked 13,000 in Israel. This blog outranks her at 8,000.
Related articles
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- Sean McBride: Pamela Geller – Blogger, Provocateur, Lightning Rod – NYTimes.com (nytimes.com)
i take it that you havent been to lgf lately…or even in the last 2 years
he no longer caters to the wingnuts…in fact, they have gone out of their way to attack him and he them
in fact, its strange that gellar would be linking to him, as he attacks her regularly
Hey, smarty. I was there yesterday & even wrote to Johnson about the Geller site stats lie.
then why did you list him among those that cater to the teabag crowd?
I don’t know who you’re referring to: Johnson? I’ve referred to him in the past as neocon & pro-Israel. But his politics have changed slightly for the better & on this issue we’re on the same side. Though he hasn’t replied to my message & may not think so.
Great digging Richard, you’re a wonder. Thanks for showing this hatefilled woman for what she is. A liar.
YOu said here
“Interestingly, Atlas Shrugged is ranked 13,000 in Israel. This blog outranks her at 8,000.”
What does that mean? That Atlas Shrugs is unpopular in Israel?
No, it means that despite her far-right anti-Muslim, pro-Israel views she doesn’t draw as large an Israeli audience as I do. That’s prob. because the main subject of my blog is Israel-Palestine while her subjects are more diffuse & tend toward American politics.
You don’t even have to dig that hard or extrapolate. Her exact, directly measured site stats are publicly available here at quantcast. They show that over the past year the site received an average of 283.5K unique visitors. bizinformation.ca’s info is just an estimate.
Richard,
Nice work, and I’ll have more to type about it shortly, but one small flaw.
This link fails to work:
You can see her “backlinks” (those who link to her) here.
Please correct it. Thank you.
I will add that I found Charlie Johnson’s take on Geller’s “profile” and the actual Q-and-A text to be hilarious.
So sorry. That was the result of speed blogging & sloppiness. Here’s the link:
http://www.rapidsitecheck.com/pagerank-backlinks.php?domain=http%3A//atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/&ref=stb
Sorry. let me be more specific, her site received an average of 283.5 thousand unique visitors a month, not the 1 million unique visitors she claims. She gets an average of 820,000 page views a month and September generated 1.1 million page views. But on average she doesn’t have 1 million anythings a month.
Another interesting thing is that Alexa has her at 1.46 pageviews per visitor, whereas the directly measured quantcast has her at an average of 2.9 – this demonstrates how inaccurate Alexa often is.
Finally, in the interests of accuracy, according to Alexa your site ranks at 8,615 in Israel, 95,545 in the US and 153,819 globally. Geller’s site ranks at 7,529 in Israel, 8,674 in the US and 23,552 globally. But it’s Alexa so, you get what you pay for.
Bottom line? Geller was off. Was it an honest mistake or did she simply not really know? I don’t know but the NYT fact checking department should have caught it.
No, I don’t think the problem is just Alexa. I’ve studied this before. ALL of the free sites & programs that measure statistics & rankings (Compete, Alexa, Quantcast) are suspect. That’s why I never believe just a single source in examining these issues. I always try to compare at least two separate ones, which is why I used Sitemeter as well as Alexa & Bizinfo.
Bizinfo ranks her site 13,000 in Israel. I couldn’t cross check how it ranks my site in Israel since it offers far fewer details about my site than hers (since she’s higher ranked).
Quantcast may be free BUT of all the services you mention it is the only one that directly measures site traffic if the webmaster puts in the Quantcast code. I checked the code on Geller’s site and the Quantcast tracking code is indeed on every page. Thus if a site is “Quantified” and the traffic is directly measured, as opposed to estimated, then the figures are pretty accurate. And Quantcast is indeed much more accurate then the demonstrably inaccurate assertions of Pam Geller. But that’s not really a surprise is it…
as much as i do not approve of her politics, since she did have 1.1 million combined in one month, you really do not have a certified gotcha going against her. and why play the gotcha game anyway? the point is her wrong ideas are bad for humanity. better to stay with that than to let the wing nuts draw you into a gotcha pissing match.
First, I don’t know what you mean by “combined.” She never had 1 million visitors whether unique, combined whatever phrase you wish to use. Second, she’s made this claim all over her blog & the internet & it should be debunked as every other lie that comes forth from her mouth should be. Third, the article claimed that she gets around 1 million visitors EVERY month, not just one.
As Pea wrote, let’s be clear about our terms. Page views are very diff. than unique visitors. If she had 900,000 visitors in a single month it’s certainly possible she had 1.1 million pg. views. But that’s not what she or the Times claimed. They said she had 1 million visitors, which she didn’t.
You are playing their game. She lies therefore her ideas are wrong. But they all lie. Attack the evil in her ideas. Don’t get distracted.
No, I’m just playing the game you’d like me to play. I’m playing my own game. I don’t know what “they all lie” means.
She lies about everything. That’s self evident. But no one has ever pointed out that she lies about this specific issue, hence it is newsworthy.
Sorry I just have a diff. editorial sense than you. You’ll have to live w. it.
Unfortunately, appealing to people’s worst emotions draws more attention and support than appealing to their finer instincts. You are no more in competion with this demagogue than you are with a porn site. nothing against porn sites which unlike Geller provide an honest service.
That was a GOOD one! Thanks for the laugh.