Project Risk
It's hard to define UrbanHonking's success. We don't make money, so there is no profit. We don't win awards, and we don't really even track our own stats. While I certainly feel that UrHo is successful, there must be some numbers to prove it.
One idea is that the "product" of UrbanHonking could be blogs, or perhaps even blog entries, which gives us an interesting way to look at progress and success. Early on we created and designed a number of blogs for people we thought would be interesting and creative writers, and some of those didn't pan out.
So an UrbanHonking success is a blog that takes off and keeps flying. Over the years we've transformed from a shotgun approach of handing out blogs like candy to more of a process where we look to see what kind of content the person makes, how consistant they are, and if they are likley to continue for a long enough time for us to feel like we should invest in them.
Unfortunately we don't have records of the failed blogs, the never-started blogs, or the brief blips of blogs. The erosion of server moves and clean up efforts have masked anything unslightly or unsuccessful. Still, by looking at the stats of the entire site I think a picture starts to emerge.
We have 88 blogs on UrbanHonking and 115 authors. Movable Type somehow determines that only 50 of those authors are active (which makes sense because of things like Ultimate Blogger). The 12,942 entries we've all written have inspired 31,872 comments (many of which I suspect are spam).
The 50 active authors to 88 blogs ratio seems to be the most useful to look at it. Even with the group blogs that leaves a number of blogs that are stale or dead. Some of them, like Warm Glow, come back.
Is UrbanHonking more successful if a higher number of the authors are active? Assuming we are applying the same standards of high quality content, then I would say yes. April marked the start of the second quarter, so perhaps in June we can come back and see if Active Authors is any higher and determine if this is a useful metric of UrHo success.
<< | Posted by kmikeym at 6:10 PM | >>
Maybe some kind of ratio of blog entries to comments might be interesting?
That would be really interesting except for all the spam that gums up the numbers.
Would people then be encouraged to blog for comments? Do we do this already? Surely there is little as satisfying in the world of blogs than seeing a dozen or so comments on something you wrote!
What about unique visitors to the frontpage? Or return visits & depth of visits over time? It seems you could plot the growth of UrbanHonking on some tangible level since its inception using that kind of data (assuming you've kept this information through the years).
Comments are interesting but difficult, I think, as a measure. Do all blogs currently have comments enabled? I agree that it feels strangely fulfilling to see comments appear in response to something you've posted. (The opposite is also true: Recently I relocated my own stuffs to a new site & lost hundreds of comments... the posts seem so bare & neglected now removed from their responses)
I do know that I often don't comment on a post when I think it's perfect. And sometimes I just say --> !
I have the sense that your ambitions are toward 'quality', whatever that is, and not toward volume. If that's true, then measurements are difficult.
Perhaps whomever is concerned with success could simply keep a periodic evaulation log. (Quarterly?) Perhaps this person or team could grade different aspects of the project, life on UHX, civility, good information, 'scoops', Laugh Out Loud-ness. Perhaps each blog could be graded, with a brief note about why that particular grade was selected for that blog at that time. Of course these would be only the subjective opinion of the grader and not for public distribution. In a very real sense, these grades would say as much, or more, about the graders' peculiar biases as the projects they are grading. Anyway, over time, the goal, obviously, would be to increase the proportion of Urban Honking attributes receiving the highest marks.
On the other hand, UrHo is a success because I say so and I know.
i have always been confused by stats. what exactly is a 'hit' anyways. but i am very curious how many people out there are reading urho and it's many blogs.
what is measurable (in terms of stats)? i agree comments are nice, but i also think there are certain demographics or personality types that tend to leave more comments then others, so that might not be the best way to judge traffic. (i.e. look at you tube comments, i'd hate to think that the videos with the most comments were deemed the better or more popular videos).
You're "not really tracking stats" -? Is there a reasoning behing not using things like Google Analytics or Mint?
Even though you aren't making money from adverts (thank God for no ads here!) it's interesting to see where visitors are coming from and how often, who's unique and who's repeat ...
We have both Mint and Google installed, and they both give wildly different numbers. Plus on Google we need to add a tag to so many pages, and that means going in and editing SO MANY templates. It's a real drag!
I have no problem with ads. (as you can prolly tell from my blog)