Don't Back Down

Don't Back Down has been active since June of 2003, and contains hundreds of entries in a number of categories, covering topics as diverse as the building of the blog to commentary on what is happening in Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as what is taking place in our country and even events around the world, providing multiple ways for you to get your message out!

Completely reliable visitor statistics can be hard to come by, because nearly everyone uses different metrics to measure both visitors and page views.

According to Google Analytics, for instance, Don't Back Down has received over one million visitors and nearly 1.5 million page views in the last 37 months. That translates to almost 29,000 visitors and 38,000 page views each and every month.

For comparison, AWStats (running locally), reports over the same period of time that there were more than 1.25 million visitors and nearly triple the number of pages served!

The important question is: Which number is the most accurate? In truth, both are probably accurate in their own ways, as they measure slightly different things.

While the Google number doesn't track certain pages, the AWStats number tracks every page - but not every one will be important to you as an advertister. For instance, you probably don't care about CSS and JavaScript. But it will also include visitors without JavaScript, which Google will not.

So somewhere in the middle of the visitor number is probably the most useful target, while slightly above the page number is probably fairly close to what you want. But I want you to be able to make that judgement for yourself, so I've included both. Let me know if you have any questions, and I'll be happy to provide you with more specifics if you need them.

For an additional tracking tool, I have also started including numbers from Quantcast, which typically reports on the low end (for whatever reason), but it does provide similar properties, so you can see what types of users frequent the site, as that might be an even more interesting comparison. Let me know what you think.

Here's the list with some specific numbers.

• Alexa: 280,565
• Google Page Rank: 2-5 (Gotta Love Google!)
• Technorati: 497,353
• Monthly Visitors: 34,000 +/- (37 Month Average, AWStats)
• Monthly Visitors: 29,000 +/- (37 Month Average, Google)
• Monthly Visitors: 22,100 +/- (via Quantcast)
• Monthly Page Views: 95,800+ (37 Month Average, AWStats)
• Monthly Page Views: 37,750+ (37 Month Average, Google)
• Monthly Page Views: 28,100+ (via Quantcast)
• RSS Readers: 375 +/- (Bloglines can vary that significantly!)

If you're interested in advertising, let me know - I don't believe in the one-size-fits-all philosophy. We'll work something out.