Another Metric Page

[JGray]

I tripped over this website (Surcentro.com) the other day while doing a Google search. The idea is simple. You plug in a website and it gives you some basic stats such as the name of the site, description, keywords, and number of unique visitors and visits per month. There's also a section that gives info on how many Google links you have and so forth.

Based on a few tests, it seems relatively accurate. The nice thing is, it works on any site, not just your own. For example, I looked up T Campbell's Penny and Aggie and it gets 11,023 uniques per month while Menage a 3 from Gisele Lagace gets 30,270 a month. Penny Arcade? 249,999 unique visitors a month.

For the record, Mysteries of the Arcana sees 2,649 visitors per month, according to Surcentro.

The website, btw, is http://www.surcentro.com/.

BTW, Rob. Freak Angels gets 13,683 unique visitors per month. I tease. I tease because I love you, man. :)

[Rob]

To be honest that sounds pretty far off to me. I can't imagine that Penny Arcade's uniques are that low. I mean that sounds really low for a month for them.

And it actually only works for the top 100,000 websites. I've seen this site before. Congrats on making it into the top 100,000. I'm not there so my site doesn't show up.

And it's FreakAngels. No space. So there.  >:(

[TTallan]

Hmm, I dunno... this site tells me my monthly absolute unique viewers are about a quarter of what Google Analytics reports. Man, and I though GA lowballed my stats!  :P

[Dr. BlkKnight]

This place doesn't even know my site exists.

[JGray]

My site's no where near the top 100,000. Its around 450,000th. And it still works. :)

And Penny Arcade's is likely spot on, actually. I thought the numbers odd at first too, since I get roughly 1000-1500 unique visitors per day. Then I remembered this is the number of unique visitors per month. If you visit Penny Arcade's site every day you don't get counted 30 times by the metric. You get counted once. So Penny Arcade doesn't have 249,999 unique visitors per month. It has roughly 249,999 readers who regularly visit their page. Quarter of a million ain't bad.

I do agree, Google Analytic's unique visitor count seems much higher (about four times as high), though. On the other hand, this site gave me a unique visitor count fairly close to comicrank.com's reader count, which only counts an IP if they visit twice within a week (or nine days or something like that). All in all, I thought this was interesting because it can give you a glimpse of other sites.

It doesn't seem to work for subdomains though, unfortunately. So you can't look at DrunkDuck comics for example.

[Rob]

Chadm1n along with several others tried to explain how site hits are counted by various metric sites to me once. Project Wonderful was shockingly higher than Google Analytics and then there were others that were different as well. What it comes down to is that all of this stuff is a bunch of voodoo. Nobody really knows how many people visit your site, all these metric cites can do is set a standard and tell you where your traffic lands while applying that standard.

For example, I'm told that large companies may have dozens if not hundreds of people reading a given webcomic that there is no way to count because of the firewalls and IP addresses used. They are either not counted at all, only counted once, or are only counted once as unique and the rest of the time as repeat visits.

I'm told the only sure fire way of knowing absolutely how much traffic you have is to see the server logs and know how many times within a given period your content gets pulled off the server. But as accurate as that is there is no way to tell from that if you had a 1000 unique viewers of one guy loading the page 1000 times.

So like I said, Voodoo.  :-\

[amanda]

I dunno, it might be reading way high, or BNR's more popular than I realized lately.  715 unique hits per month?  Err... most of my metric sites say otherwise (closer to 100).
And Salt doesn't even register even though metrics sites put it higher than BNR (around 200).
I like the idea of it, but I'm skeptical ^.^

[Rob]

Metric sites are a waste of time. Pulling your own server logs and comparing it to something like this, and Google Analytics and Alexa and Project Wonderful is the only way to get some sort of estimate as to your real traffic numbers and even then it's a rough estimate.

It really is all voodoo.  :P

[Miluette]

Places like this always lump together the sum stats of senshuu.com, never its subdomains individually. Real useful. :B

Analytics/Statcounter are my friends.

[Knara]

And Penny Arcade's is likely spot on, actually. I thought the numbers odd at first too, since I get roughly 1000-1500 unique visitors per day. Then I remembered this is the number of unique visitors per month. If you visit Penny Arcade's site every day you don't get counted 30 times by the metric. You get counted once. So Penny Arcade doesn't have 249,999 unique visitors per month. It has roughly 249,999 readers who regularly visit their page. Quarter of a million ain't bad.

I dunno.  Khoo's "webcomic business model" graphic says "over 1,000,000" readers per month.  Now, granted, "readers" is vague, but it would seem to *me* that 1,000,000 would be too low for simply a count of total "page views".  Furthermore, if we consider a month to be the "term" for considering uniqueness, ~250,000 unique viewers with ~1,000,000 "page views" (if we suspect "readers" means "individual views") would only be about 4 views per visitor for the whole month.  To me, that seems unlikely, as well.  I *suspect* that, ignoring the PA forums, 250k unique visitors per month is low (especially given that Khoo states the revenue for PA is north of $500k/yr, and given what we know of their operations and staff, that seems plausible). 

Of course, that's revenue, not profit.  As such, one could argue that large expenditures like PAX could result in the stated revenue figure being deceptive.  It seems, though, that the state of their organization is robust, and so I think we can assume that their margins are rather healthy.  But if we're generous and say that PAX is responsible for 25% of revenues for the past fiscal year, that's 75% that had to be made up through advertisement and merchandise sales.

Now, it's fairly commonly accepted that most viewers of any comic don't buy anything related to the franchise.  maybe 1% of the total.  *maybe*.

So let's do some simple estimating, 75% of 500k is $375k (Khoo just says "more than", so eh, we'll go with the minimum). 

If we need just merchandise (figures, books, posters, etc) to achieve that $375k, and assume that only 1% of 1,000,000 readers buy something in a year at ~$14 (let's throw a number as an average for the moment) that'd be 10,000 transactions

So:
$375,000/14 = ~26,785 transactions

What if we give the $500k some more subdivisions and say that 25% of that $500k is also advertising, that'd be $250k that needs to be made up by merchandise sales:

250,000/14 = ~17,857 transactions

How about 50% if the $500k in revenue per year is advertising?

125,000/14 = ~8928 transactions, a bit lower than the 10k.  Personally, I highly doubt they make 50% of revenue from advertising.

So, we need to have half of PA's revenue (with PAX being 25%) to be from advertising before we get down to the 1% of a million per month readers that you could generously expect to buy merchandise.

I suspect, though, that less than 1% of their viewers buy anything from them.  If we assume .5% buy merch from them, you need more total viewers to make it to those same numbers.

In short, I don't think 1,000,000 unique views per month is at all unreasonable.

Web stats shouldn't be so hard to pin down.  Has always bugged me.   >:(

[JGray]

Do you mean unique visitors? Or pageviews? Because you mentioned pageviews and I was talking about individual visitors.

[Knara]

Do you mean unique visitors? Or pageviews? Because you mentioned pageviews and I was talking about individual visitors.

As I mentioned, I think that 1,000,000 unique visitors (around-about) is pretty plausible.  Jeph Jacques (of Questionable Content) stated just recently, "It still hits me at least once every day, the realization that 'holy shit, hundreds of thousands of people read my comic.'"  With that in mind, here's the display graph for QC on Project Wonderful (QC is a comic that updates M-F):



Now, PW does "uniques per day" so we can average out the days to get a rough per-month idea of readership.  As you can see, QC sits between 225k and ~500k unique views, with the pageviews between 800k and 1.6M 

PA is much more popular than QC.