Coffee, Sun & Technology

Viral marketing and word-of-mouth fascinate me. I’ve posted on this topic before and it’s nice to take a look at some numbers from time to time, between 2 shooter releases. Feedburner has been serving all my feeds for over a year now, and I’ve also been running Fireclick and Google Analytics to analyze traffic patterns on this blog. It’s fun to compare and contrast Feedburner with traditional analytics reports.

The first chart I want to discuss features visits to the site (sessions to http://www.coffeesuntechnology.com) to readership numbers (via RSS). As you can see below, the RSS readership is on a nice upward trend, whereas the number of visits to the site is stagnating. In this same chart you can see the actual first time visits as well, i.e. how many new people came to the site.

Most visits to the actual site are from first time users. Very few loyal readers actually routinely visit the site: they subscribe to the RSS feed. Now, let’s do a quick Excel extrapolation: everyday that goes by, I get 0.71 new feed subscriber on average, about 10 times higher than my site visitor growth (~0.072/day).

Now pushing the numbers a bit, let’s compute an RSS conversion rate for the blog, defined as:

Conversion rate = [Site visits] / [RSS subscriptions]

Since May 1st ‘05 I got an average of 17.5 visits per day (95%ile) and a since my daily growth is about 0.71 new RSS subscriber per day. It gives me an average conversion rate of 0.71/17.5 = 4.06%.

A few quick comments - for this blog (may or may not apply to others)

(1) RSS
- builds loyalty
- needs to be monitored
- captures an audience of qualified readers, therefore could be monetized

(2) Direct traffic to a blog
- Mostly junk (up to 96%), looking for coffee beans, coffee analytics, and some random people
- doesn’t need to be monitored
- basically unqualified readers, spam and headaches

[Read related articles: “Using Web analytics to drive more traffic to my site” series - part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10 part 11 What lessons have you learned and A blogger’s theory]

Sitting at the Perenety Starbucks (101/Lawrence, near the AMC, for the “locals”…) - and we get our first “Hey just read an article on the Mercury News talking about you guys. Looks like you guys are really doing well!”

Ok, ok. It was our real estate agent who found our office space in Sunnyvale. Still, felt real good. We’ve had some incredible media coverage for being a totally stealth startup - Om Malik, CNN Money, the Mercury News…- considering the fact that we haven’t talked to any journalist or blogger yet - and that we’re just in private/closed alpha right now.

And Mom (from Europe) sent me a shoot this morning a painting of hers via shooter. She gave me a good laugh (from her shoot):

Like every morning before leaving for work, I check my horoscope - and saw a little alert saying “new shoot”. I opened shooter and saw your office party photos and the small video clip. You all look awesome. Shouldn’t we use shooter instead of the open Internet for sending photos? Seems easier and more private.”

Yes, Mom. You totally got it.

I’ve had the $500 front row ticket for the Google show for years now… From the days when I was a EE grad student at Stanford (1998-2000), to the days when my baby Fireclick (my prior company) was measuring phenomenal ROIs from Google Adword Campaigns (2001-2003), to the days when the same Fireclick, located on Charleston Road - Mountain View, got slowly surrounded by Googlers (2003-2005). One floor after another in our building - one building after another around us.

I still cannot accept the idea that “search”, or rather “finding” is the fundamental reason why people are online. It’s not just about efficiency, at least for many of us - and the emergence of the so-called “social Web” is proving the Web can be just another place where you can hang out.

Now understand my astonishment when I read this CNN Money article - Don’t believe the MySpace hype - specifically this paragraph:

There have been rumblings that News Corp. is looking to forge a deal with Google or Microsoft’s (Research) MSN which would allow those companies to post their search results on MySpace and split the ad revenues. There has also been some speculation that News Corp. could just build or buy its own search engine.

“Searchify” MySpace? Please don’t. Searchify blogging? Even worse. If we want the Web to become a social destination we need to give it a soul - dim the lights a tiny bit and keep Mountain View geeks under control.

The New York Times reports: “U.S. Wants Companies to Keep Web Usage Records” - in order to help fight terrorism and child pornography. There is a small problem however: retaining 2 years of server logs isn’t going to help fight terrorism or child pornography, because there is a simple way for the bad guys to remain anonymous: block cookies.

But unfortunately this isn’t about the bad guys. It’s about the honest people who are getting the message that they don’t get any privacy online - to the most extreme level. Where you live, what your house looks like, how much you paid for it, what job you have, what sites you’ve visited, what you’ve searched, what your political affiliation is, etc.

When are we finally going to go beyond the child pornography or terrorism cliches and recognize that (a) online privacy is a concern to all of us, (b) something’s got to be done to protect it.

Georges Anidjar, president of Omniture France (Web analytics vendor) says in this article: “10 to 15% of worldwide Internet traffic goes through our server rooms” (in French: “10 à 15 % du trafic Internet mondial transite aujourd’hui par nos salles serveurs”, from the article published here - in French). Is this bad journalism, ignorance, or just Omniture FUD?