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What Kind of Blogging Brings the Most Traffic?

By drorzel on March 16, 2008.

A little while back, there was some discussion of what science blogging should be, where the question of what draws the most traffic came up. A couple of people said they see more traffic from "real" science posts than from other trivia, in contrast to my claim that I see more traffic from other stuff.

It occurs to me that I have inadvertently run the experiment to test this over the past week: This week, I posted five hard-core physics posts, one each week day, and three of them were also tagged for ResearchBlogging.org. I also posted a bunch of frivolous things-- animal pictures, FutureBaby playlists, a jokey guide to talking like a physicist. So, what does looking at the traffic numbers from Google Analytics tell us?

Talk Like a Physicist was the runaway winner for the week, with 1,215 pageviews (the second-place post had 453). The five hard-core physics posts (Cavity QED, Cold Plasmas, Biophysics, Francium, and Four-Wave Mixing) all together netted 1,180 page views. Each of those five probably took an hour and a half to write, if not more. "Talk Like a Physicist" took fifteen minutes. Not one of the physics posts made the top five most-viewed posts for the week-- not one of them even managed to beat the first FutureBaby playlist for page views.

When I say that I get more traffic from posting about things other than physics, that's what I'm talking about.

So, how do I reconcile these numbers with what John Hawks and others said during the recent discussion? I'm not sure. One possibility would be that I just have a higher threshold for what I consider a lot of traffic-- back before I joined ScienceBlogs, I would've been happy to get 1,200 page views for a week's worth of blogging. Now, that's a rotten total for a Sunday.

Another possibility is that there just aren't that many people who care about physics. The people who report significantly better traffic from serious science posts are working in sciences that are more broadly accessible than physics-- anthropology, cognitive science, biomedical science. There's probably a bigger audience for that sort of thing than for detailed discussion of experimental atomic physics. The most successful of the physics posts was the one about biophysics, which might lend some support to this explanation.

Whatever the explanation, the fact is that, for me, serious posts about peer-reviewed physics generally involve a great deal of work, for very little reward. I'm not going to stop posting that stuff-- I didn't write those posts because I thought they would get me tons of traffic, I wrote them because I genuinely enjoyed those lab visits, and came back fired up about the cool science going on at NIST and UMD. I've got another one queued up for tomorrow (mentally, anyway-- I haven't written it yet). Other science-related things draw a better return on the investment of time-- the "Users Guide to Vacuum Pumps" posts (Part 1, Part 2) did very well, with 432 and 331 pageviews, respectively, and "Basic Concepts" posts do fairly well. But the peer-reviewed stuff just isn't going to pay the bills.

For the record, here are the top 20 posts, in number of page views, according to Analytics, for the week of March 9-15:

  1. /talk_like_a_physicist.php1,215
  2. /pimp_me_new_blogs_1.php453
  3. /a_users_guide_to_vacuum_pumps.php432
  4. /tips_for_speakers.php333
  5. /a_users_guide_to_vacuum_pumps_1.php331
  6. /futurebaby_playlist_ab.php317
  7. /art_and_animals.php275
  8. /lab_visit_report_biophysics.php258
  9. /lab_visit_report_francium.php256
  10. /post_3.php251
  11. /lorentz_contracted_asteroids.php244
  12. /nice_beaver.php243
  13. /lab_visit_report_cold_plasmas.php236
  14. /headline_mismatch.php193
  15. /score_one_for_physics.php184
  16. /lab_visit_report_fourwave_mixi.php179
  17. /futurebaby_playlist_cg.php174
  18. /interstellar_economics.php169
  19. /imperturbable_ducks.php146
  20. /slothinabox_1.php139

("Post 3" is the Cavity QED lab vist report, because I saved it before I titled it. You can figure out all the rest of them pretty easily.)

(Caveats: These numbers are "Page Views" not "Unique Page Views," so a monkey hitting "Refresh" over and over could greatly inflate the tally. This also accounts for a little over half of the traffic to the blog over the past week-- 7,105 of the 12,863 pageviews over the past week went to a specific individual post page from the month of March, with the rest just hitting the front page, or going to some older post page. These numbers might also be a hair low, because Analytics tends to lag a bit, but it should've picked up everything from yesterday.)

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My heart goes out to all of the bloggers who write substantive posts which consume time, talent and research energies. I used to write health care issues and policy posts, and they garnered near absolute zero response. I finally gave it up because I was giving away work without any reward whatsoever. So now when I blog, it's all about me and my interests. I don't aim to please any particular reader, and I assume no interest on anyone's part. That has eased the pressure of trying for readership, and I don't have any income from blogging, although originally I had hoped to use it as a venue by which to market my writing for free lance assignments and consulting.

That's the most pragmatic advice I can offer so that you don't get your heart broken when "stoopid physics tricks" posts far and away outpace readership.

Dear Chad,

I think your Talk like a physicist post got a link from Marginal Revolution; so, I am curious to know as to how many of the hits for the post are due to the link from MR.

Guru

I think there might be another factor, too: if one has a low-traffic site (like mine, for example), there isn't a lot of point in putting in jokes, rants, or other things that
often seem to bring in lots of people on the more big-time sites. This is because such posts are, by their nature, ephemeral- they are something that people get referred to by word-of-mouth and hit on impulse, but aren't the sort of thing that you turn up when you are doing a search for some sort of specific information. A post like that on a low-traffic site doesn't get noticed before it becomes lost in the noise of similar posts on thousands of other blogs.
On the other hand, putting in a solid effort on an informative posting that includes information that isn't readily found elsewhere, will lead to a more or less continuous stream of people finding it on searches. This will let it draw in moderate traffic for months or even years. I think it would be of interest to look not just at your postings from, say, the last week, but to look further at how they perform over the course of a year or two.

Well, I for one greatly appreciate your posts about experimental condensed-matter physics. Physics books and blogs tend to be about theory, and they tend to be about COSMOLOGY! and M-THEORY!!! and so on. It's really nice to read about some nuts-and-bolts physics of the kind I remember from school.

Out of curiosity, do you have any plans to write a book for the educated layman? Surveying the landscape of pop-physics books, there seems to be an unfilled niche for talking about:

1. how small team condensed matter physics is actually pretty neat
2. the trials and tribulations of doing real science in a lab, with real instruments that break down
2a. hilarious lab disaster stories

In other words, a physics book that simply tries to explain what the majority of physicists do all day, with plain language and a heavy dose of self-deprecation and humor. As opposed to trying to BLOW YOUR MIND. Who knows, you could be on PBS in a turtleneck before you know it. :)

From my experience, as both a writer and a reader of blog posts, the "hard-core physics posts" require more energy not just to write them down, but also to read and digest. This reduces the "instant" hit rates from people who are looking for a fast distraction, which is, I guess, an important point why we use blogs.

On the other hand, also from the experience at backreaction, the posts with substantial content often show up in specific google searches, and so they bring a small but constant number of readers on the long run, when all "pretty dog picture posts" have been lost since long in the noise of thousands of blogs.

The cavity QED post (I liked it a lot - somehow a comment and a question of mine got lost last Sunday, there was some glitch with the SB server?) is now google hit number 6 when searching for "cavity QED", and people who find it that way and read it will get the best short introduction into what this is all about among the first few hits.

I have never done a detailed "long-term page view" analysis, but I can imagine that the list looks quite different when you check it again in a year or so?

Best, Stefan

Oh, I see that tceisele has brought up the same point before me - didn't note that while writing my comment. But then it is probably a valid point ;-)

I tend to save longer posts for when I have more time to read them (i.e. weekends). When I'm doing a quick check between classes or *trying* to take a quick study break, it's too easy to be sucked into spending too much time reading.

But I did go back and read a couple of them! :-)

I've noticed the same thing. I post some really cool simulation, and I have no idea if anyone looks at it. (I can't keep track of hits on my blog.) I post a picture of a horrendously ugly outfit that I found in another blog, and people talk about it for a week. But people link to the boring topics and not the ugly outfits/rants/philosophical maundering. Cest la vie.

I admit to skipping over most pure science posts, and not just on your blog. There are many obstacles involved with reading science posts. They must be neither too difficult, nor too easy. I must be able to correctly assess the difficulty without wasting too much time. They must be either very general, or on a topic that I have special interest in (there are too many topics in science for me to know everything beyond the most general of levels). I must be willing to spend the time and effort to read them, because they really do take more effort to read.

As for my own blogging, I find that science posts definitely take more work to write, but they generate the most traffic, since most of my traffic is from google. That's not why I write them, of course. I usually write them because they're the sort of thing I wish I could've found when I was younger. But what interests me might be boring to others, in the same way that I find vacuum pumps boring. There's just too much science for me to be interested in everything.

I agree.

I've been writing about junk science in war-torn countries, and that series of posts has attracted little attention. Meanwhile, I wrote a daft post about fundamentalism, and it ended up on Stumbleupon bringing in an extra 500 unique visitors a day.

I'm also becoming quite disillusioned with ResearchBlogging full stop. There are so many posts on there that it's hard to get any attention, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of organization to the site that would enable people to find your posts.

Guru: I think your Talk like a physicist post got a link from Marginal Revolution; so, I am curious to know as to how many of the hits for the post are due to the link from MR.

I don't know if I did get a Marginal Revolutions link. Are you thinking of Brad DeLong instead?

At the moment, Analytics shows 1242 hits, with 299 of those coming from nielsenhayden.com, and 68 from delong.typepad.com. Everything else is down from that.

Stefan: I have never done a detailed "long-term page view" analysis, but I can imagine that the list looks quite different when you check it again in a year or so?

I don't have hard numbers, but I'll try to check back on this in a month or two. My vague impression is that you're right-- the "serious" posts draw a steady trickle of search-engine traffic, and over the course of a year or more, end up piling up more hits than some of the lighter posts.

Martin: I'm also becoming quite disillusioned with ResearchBlogging full stop. There are so many posts on there that it's hard to get any attention, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of organization to the site that would enable people to find your posts.

It probably doesn't help anything that a glitch in their database program causes all my stuff to be filed under "Astronomy" rather than "Physics"...

I suspect that it works better for cognitive science and biology, because the drive for it came out of blogs in those fields. I don't think there's much buy-in at all from the physics blog community, because the people who do lots of serious blogging about current research come out of the high energy world, and all their stuff is based on arXiv preprints. By the time something hits a journal that ResearchBlogging recognizes, it's completely stale as far as those bloggers are concerned.

For the record, the most successful of the peer-reviewed research posts, the one on biophysics, has seen an estimated 4 pageviews thanks to referrals from ResearchBlogging.org, out of 272 at the time of this posting.

Chad, I just want to thank you for the work you do on the physics posts. They may not get much traffic, but for me, they are they epitome of how to convey physics to the general audience (umm, at least the general audience that is me). Of all the physics blogs out there (not many) I think you and Sean over at Cosmic Variance really do a great job with a difficult subject. This last week was a real treat. So thanks again.

Why should you care how many people read your junk posts? I think your blog is better without them. I only read the science related posts which are very good.

As far as I can tell, getting people to read a post on, for example, "Baby seals want me to vote Republican. Should I kill and skin them?" or whatever other fluff topic does not cause much readership for the things that matter.

Some time ago I must have written something on the measurement problem in QM. Bras and kets and all that. A result of this was that someone trying to decide what size undergarment his girlfriend wore found my site. Did he become a regular reader interested in physics content? I guess anything's possible, but I doubt it.

By Carl Brannen (not verified) on 16 Mar 2008 #permalink

Sorry about my monkey wrecking your stats experiment. I found him on the web trying to shop his play around but I guess he had done some other surfing first. I'll take better care to secure his cage in the future.

I'm a non-scientist. I read all kinds of posts, but I am more likely to understand grammar and humor than physics. That doesn't mean you should write to the lowest level, but there are a lot of us low-level readers.

Why should you care how many people read your junk posts? I think your blog is better without them. I only read the science related posts which are very good.

The short and cynical answer is: I have a financial stake i this. Seed pays me a small amount of money for blogging here, and how much I get depends on the number of pageviews the blog receives each month. More hits, more cash.

Even without that, though, I care about the number of people reading this because I want to be read by other people. If I didn't, I wouldn't be posting my random thoughts publically via a world-wide communications medium. Even before I moved here, I made a conscious effort to post things that I thought would bring in readers and comments. That's why I'm doing this, rather than just ranting to Kate at dinner.

I forgot to reply to this from Evan Goer: Out of curiosity, do you have any plans to write a book for the educated layman? [...]

In other words, a physics book that simply tries to explain what the majority of physicists do all day, with plain language and a heavy dose of self-deprecation and humor. As opposed to trying to BLOW YOUR MIND.

Well, let's see how I do with the BLOW YOUR MIND book, first... I expect to get official feedback Any Day Now.

It's an interesting suggestion, though, and something I'll consider if the Bunnies Made of Cheese book does well enough that people will pay me to write something else.

Dear Chad,

I am sorry; I have all the economic blogs in a directory, and mistook the Brad DeLong post with MR. In any case, in my blog too, I found that the posts that get lots of hits are also the ones that get linked to by others, and more often than not, such links are not to "real" science posts. So, one thing that might get such posts more wider audience would be if lots of physics--condensed matter bloggers share links of such posts in their blogs, I guess.

Guru

# 3 tceisele writes:
I think there might be another factor, too: if one has a low-traffic site (like mine, for example), there isn't a lot of point in putting in jokes, rants, or other things that
often seem to bring in lots of people on the more big-time sites.

Wait-- Tim Eisele has a site?

http://somethingscrawlinginmyhair.com/

Cool!

I'm going over now to check it out. Bye, Chad.

I think you should think about a bit of maths and probability when considering your blog stats. There are zillions of people out there, mostly sweet young things, who thrive on trivia and fun- they don't even have a concept of physics as something you might be interested in outside of an exam. Physics is meant to be for nerds and most youngsters don't want to label themselves that way. So, there is a very small probability of a random blog-cruiser being attracted to anything about physics, plus there is only another non-100% probability that your usual blog friends will drop by, or that a genuine physics-mad blogger will find you that day/week. It may be a good strategy to put something whimsical in your blog as it may suck in some people who really might be curious about the fun side of physics- but only see it as bait, not the answer to getting more hits. If you're focused totally on getting hits from others, I think you're missing part of the purpose of a blog, which [to lil ole me] is just being able to express yourself "out there" about things you are interested in. I think blogging is mainly personal and if others read your stuff and respond, that's a real bonus! I never get disappointed!