“Experian Hitwise has released its yearly search term statistics and once again, Facebook and YouTube top the list. The remainder of the top 10 includes three more Facebook-related terms, a couple of Yahoo! variants, craigslist, eBay, and MapQuest. Of course it’s highly unlikely that all the millions of people putting those terms in the top 10 are actually looking for information or the latest news about them; they just want a quick way to the site without having to clumsily type dots and slashes.”

The fact that people do this boggles my mind. I remember the first time I saw it – when I was doing support for a local ISP as one of my first jobs in IT – someone searched for Google.com using the Yahoo search field. I nearly fell to the ground. I asked them why they searched for Google.com instead of just typing it into the location bar. They said “What’s the difference?”

I agree with Parish that people aren’t searching for information about Facebook, Youtube, etc. They are, in fact, using search as the location bar. But I disagree that people are doing it as a way to get away from the confusing “dots and slashes”. I’ve seen people type in “.com”. They simply do not know the difference between the search field and the location field.

Think about it. Most modern-day web browsers combine the location and search fields. Safari doesn’t but it only maintains a small marketshare. Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox combine the search and location fields into one field that you can type just about anything in and the browser will figure out what you are looking for. So, are they searching for information about Facebook when they type in Facebook? Or are they simply hitting ‘Enter’ too quickly and they really want to navigate to that URL?

I’m sure extensive user testing would be needed to determine the plethora of habits of people; novice and expert alike. One thing is sure, the browsers should be doing a much better job of taking people to web pages instead of search results in different situations. But, why would they? They make their money on searches too.

I want to change that.

I’m going to start featuring well-designed, still in-use Dashboard widgets from time-to-time here on the blog. My personal blog is relatively obscure in today’s tech web but – hopefully – one or two people will find these posts about these widgets. If you’ve run across, or built, any Dashboard widgets you think should get some attention – feel free to email them in.

So lets start out with GAget – a well-designed Google Analytics Dashboard widget by Zoltan Hosszu. (Side note: Zoltan is an awesome name.)

I don’t know about you but logging into any Google Account or any Google product has been troublesome over the last few years. I’ve got personal accounts, Google Apps accounts, work accounts, etc. I get sick of switching. GAget allows me to quickly take a look at any of my site’s statistics by simply swiping (with three-fingers on Lion) over to my Dashboard.

GAget’s HUD shows you exactly what you need to see at a glance; number of visitors today, the trend over the last week, two weeks, or month, the bounce rate, time-on-site, and how many hits were new visitors. Very, very good information if you’re striving to bring up the overall audience for your site.

If you happen to need more information, perhaps for advertising purposes, you can always log into Google Analytics and drill down further.

I have two feature requests: a way to see the top 10 search keywords that people are finding the site with, and the top 10 URLs on the site (besides the homepage). But overall this widget does just enough to keep the stat addict in you well fed.

“In the past week, the daily visitors at AVC have gone from an average of 10k per day to over 20k per day. Where is it coming from? Well the answer to that is pretty obvious – StumbleUpon.”

I too am seeing an increase of traffic to this site from StumbleUpon (though not nearly as much an increase as Fred has). StumbleUpon is obviously growing.

/via Dan Frommer.

Since the few enormous inflection points a few months ago (such as being featured on Tumblr’s official Tumblr Tuesday) growth of the gallery’s audience has ceased. A few more Tumblr followers trickle in each week, a few more people “Like” the gallery on Facebook, and follow @h2ocolor on Twitter – but it appears that the same number of people that come in also walk back out of the door. This could easily be because, like Twitter, a huge number of accounts on Tumblr are spam or bots or junk accounts and they will, inevitably go inactive or be deleted. But I can’t be sure of that so I’ll just have to assume that a Tumblr follow is about as loyal a connection as reused, wet tape.

I try not to focus too much on statistics but also engagement. For me the best way to know if people are finding the gallery useful or enjoyable is how they interact and use the information on the site. For the most part, every single painting that gets featured on the gallery gets some sort of attention from the audience on Tumblr. Tumblr allows people to quickly “like” or to “reblog” a post to their own blogs. The viral nature of these two features make growing a new site fairly quick and easy. But it also creates, what would seem to be, a false sense of the level of engagement from the community.

It is so easy to like and reblog posts that anything above and beyond those two interactions is seemingly difficult to get from the Tumblr audience. Perhaps they are spoiled (and I mean this in a nice way) and they don’t need to do any more than that. If it takes more than a few seconds to decide what they are going do with a post they simply will move onto the next one. And believe me, there is a ‘next one’ waiting.

Tumblr’s staggering growth is fairly well known at this point. The amount of content flooding into the system, especially for those that follow dozens or hundreds of Tumblr-powered sites, must be completely overwhelming. A quick reload of one’s Tumblr Dashboard would probably reveal 10 new posts every few minutes or even seconds. Scrolling through that list and quickly clicking like or reblog has probably become a habit for many Tumblr addicts. As an example of this; for about three months straight a single Tumblr account was liking every single one of The Watercolor Gallery’s posts almost immediately after the post was published. My guess is that this person was wholly addicted to Tumblr’s Dashboard and sat on the site for the better part of the day clicking “like” on anything that rushed passed their nose. I can’t know for sure, but the patterns that I’ve seen – like the one described, certainly lend themselves to the idea that the Tumblr audience is chocked full of happy clickers.

A good example of this is the Artist Interview series on the site. By far the hardest posts to craft are the interviews of these artists. These posts are also the least liked and reblogged. I’d also wager that 90% of the people that follow the gallery on Tumblr don’t even read the interviews. Far more traffic comes from the artist linking to the interview and Google than it does from the Tumblr Dashboard. Obviously, one can’t be sure of what is read and not read on the Dashboard – since there are no stats for that – but if someone took the time to read the entire interview I’d have to assume they’d take the time to click “like”. I don’t think it is that the interviews aren’t good or that they aren’t valuable. As a watercolorist myself I find them extremely valuable and I’m sure that most other watercolorists would too (if not simply interesting or entertaining). I think the Tumblr audience simply skips the interviews on their Dashboard and move onto the next photo/video/easily-digestable post.

If I would have started with a WordPress-powered blog it is doubtful The Watercolor Gallery would have seen the amazingly quick growth that it did. However, would the growth have continued? Would the engagement with the community been greater? I don’t know. I don’t regret my decision to use Tumblr to power the gallery and it is a decision that I’m going to stick with for the foreseeable future. I just hope to put in some effort into growing the gallery’s audience even more and gaining a loyal, active audience that will appreciate everything the gallery offers.

Here are the statistics for the last 30 days here on my personal site. Internet Explorer is still #1 in spite of every single geek on the planet wanting it to simply go away. But it isn’t winning by much. Firefox and Safari are pretty close behind and Chrome is catching up quickly.

The Safari number includes both iPhone and iPad as well as the Macintosh and Windows. The Mac and iPhone split up the biggest portion of this with Windows and iPad nearly tying.

Interestingly, if you combine Chrome and Safari, which both run the Webkit rendering engine, then Webkit clearly stands out as the #1 rendering engine for all HTML/JS on my site.

So it looks like it is Internet Explorer vs. Webkit – at this point – as being the two main contenders in this war. Firefox, which is doing very very well on its own, is beginning to show signs of lagging behind both Safari and Chrome in their growth rates. This could all change in one day with one killer update from Mozilla – but I’m not holding my breath.

So why do I say that there are ton of casualties in this war? Because the people who spend all of their time building websites and applications have more browsers to build against than ever before, not less. More screens, more devices means more problems. Choice for the end user means headaches for the builders.

This problem probably won’t go away even if every browser manufacturer united under the banner of Webkit. If they did the spirit and motivation of competition would be gone – leaving only the end-user to suffer from lack of progress.

It appears that this war is not going to end and the bodies will continue to pile.

Today I’m going to focus on audience. I haven’t really talked much about audience since I began. To be honest, I wasn’t really focused on it. I was tracking it but I wasn’t worried about where the audience would come from or actively trying to grow the audience on my own. I didn’t buy any ads, share any links, or do anything special whatsoever. I simply focused on making a gallery that I would like to visit. In fact, the only update I gave regarding audience was back in August when I said:

“I have many, many ideas for The Watercolor Gallery and I’ll be working on them as the site gets more and more of an audience. Right now, after only a week, the audience seems to be near 50 people per day. I’m extremely happy with this.”

Well, the Watercolor Gallery has found an audience. Since that update there have been several surges in both traffic and people ‘following’ the gallery on Tumblr and Twitter. The two most notable surges amounted to thousands of new people being ‘members’ of the gallery. And if I was happy with 50 people per day I’m very happy for thousands. The two main surges resulted from a painting going ‘Tumblr-viral’ and, yesterday, The Watercolor Gallery being featured on Tumblr Tuesday.

By the way, having a single post go Tumblr-rival seemingly has more legs than being featured on Tumblr Tuesday. However, being featured is only 24 hours old so I’ll withhold firm judgement until the dust settles.

I have reason to be happy with The Watercolor Gallery gaining so much momentum in such a short period of time. As I said in August, I have plans for the gallery that would be utterly fruitless without a fairly large audience. So far I’ve added two new series to the gallery in addition to the paintings.

The artist interview series has been a smashing success. It isn’t easy, and took a bit of work from me to get rolling but so far the interviews that have been published are just great and the upcoming interviews (of which I have 12 in the can right now) are just outstanding. Watercolor artists are part of a global community and this fact shines through these interviews. So far I’ve published interviews with artists in Bangkok, Thailand, Waxahachie, Texas, Scarborough, England, Los Angeles, California and Jerome, Arizona. These interviews have not been the most popular (in terms of “likes” or “reblogs” on Tumblr) posts on the gallery but – I think – they add a certain professional nature to the gallery as a whole. The Watercolor Gallery isn’t just a Tumblog that reblogs every watercolor painting that passes by my desk. It is a serious look at how artists can be inspired by looking at and learning from other artists, their paintings and their workspaces.

Which leads us to the Artspaces series. In a word, this series has been a flop. I’ve gotten absolutely zero submissions since I began this series on the gallery. Zero. The artspaces that you see on the site have been gathered by me personally. I’ve searched for them, asked for permission from their respective owners to publish them, written the posts and published them. But I’m not giving up. I believe we have a lot to learn from the workspaces of every artist. I believe every artist should want to have their artspace published on The Watercolor Gallery – for two main reasons. First, I think it is an easy way to be seen on the gallery (whether or not the artist specializes in watercolor). With the audience growing every day it now means something to be featured on the gallery. Second, I think it is a fun series and who doesn’t like to have fun? I might be wrong about the Artspaces series but I’m going to give it a little while to catch on before I make that decision.

I believe the Tumblr community is one of less interaction then online communities of the past. They’d rather simply click a “like” button on a photo then read an entire post, submit a photo to your site or compete in a contest. At least, that is the way that it appears. I plan on overcoming this challenge by, hopefully, providing something valuable to everyone that joins the gallery. I hope The Watercolor Gallery becomes a notable moment in an artist’s journey when they are featured there and for it to be another tool for artists all over the world to be inspired by others.

The future of The Watercolor Gallery looks very bright. Some of the things I thought I would have to wait months to be able to try I believe I can do sooner thanks to these boosts in audience. I’m looking forward to working even harder on making The Watercolor Gallery a truly special place for watercolor artists and those they inspire to gather together and enjoy each other’s work and company. I’m extremely happy that so many people have thought it worthy of their “follow”.

It seems everyone is playing Oregon Trail online.

Something new from Viddler today. Something we’ve been working on for quite a while. Viddler Analytics is a new feature that makes it easy to understand complex video statistics. Looking forward to seeing how our customer base reacts to this one.

I’ve done my own, rather simplified version, of sampling some Twitter data. I was primarily trying to determine the number of “real followers” I had as opposed to what Twitter says. I came up with much lower numbers than Clinton did, but then again his sampling was much larger. At current my Twitter account hovers around 1,600 followers. If Clinton’s data is accurate, that puts me at about 350 active followers.

That seems to be right on the money. Either way, it shows that those that have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter really don’t have that kind of pull. But they still have about 30% of that pull.

Source: Sampling Twitter.
Via: Andy Baio.

Turns out, my reasons for turning it back off one day later were no different than my reasons for turning it off a few years ago. Redirects and downtime.

What Feedburner does, in a nutshell, is redirects your feed URL (in my case, this one) to a URL at Feedburner. This way they are able to track the number of times the feed is requested, what requests the feed, etc. They also do this for individual posts to help track statistics by post.

The service is, or rather was, very good at one point. It was one of the only services that truly did a fair job at calculating the number of subscribers to a feed accurately. Among other things.  But that was years ago. Then they were having trouble keeping the service up likely due to popularity.

You see, when a service like Feedburner goes down – it effects everyone that uses it. Not in the same way that if Twitter goes down it effects everyone that uses it though. If Feedburner goes down, my feed is “down” (even when it really isn’t). People are unable to retrieve my content through feeds.

You may have seen services like Bit.ly or TinyURL. They are convenient in that they shorten a URL for use on services that only allow a finite number of characters. But, if they go down, all of those URLs also go down.

Feedburner was acquired by Google somewhere around May of 2007. After raising only $10M in capital over two separate rounds of funding – they managed to exit to Google for a reported $100M.  Not a bad turn around. The upshot for the users was that the service would, or should, become much more stable. Combine that with the talents of all of those Google engineers drumming away on their keyboards in Mountain View, California – and you’ve got yourself something of great value.

To top it off – Google decided to lift the veil on Pro accounts and give them away for free.

On Sunday, after years of having the service off, I wanted to find out how many people were subscribed to my blog’s feed. The obvious choice was Feedburner. Surely by now they’ve figured out their stability issues, they’ve improved the system 10-fold or more, and they’ve probably got some features that would “wow” me. That simply wasn’t so. Hours after installing the needed plugins Feedburner went down. So did my feed. When the service came back up I logged in to see if there was anything new at Feedburner. Generally speaking, there wasn’t. In fact, some of the tools that I used to rely on didn’t seem to perform as well as I had remembered.

So, in my opinion, Feedburner is dead.

To top if off – Feedburner put my number of subscribers at a relatively low number. This could have been due to the downtime which made the count be a little off. Who knows? Who cares.  I am not going to try to count them anymore.  If you are reading this post from a feed, consider stopping by the site now and then. Thanks.

Side note: Please check the URL of the feed you are subscribed to for this site.  It should be http://cdevroe.com/feed/ and not anything with “feedburner” in it.

My experiment was to only show ads to people that came from search engines, and those that have not commented on my site in a while, or ever (shame on you).  In fact, if you came from a search engine, the site would show you two sets of ads; one on the top of the post and one on the bottom.  This method of displaying ads very selectively, I think, has improved the overall statistics regarding my ads.  Which I’ll share with you now – in perhaps too great of detail for some of you.

My click through rate is at 0.33% and my average eCPM is $0.94 (though today it is inexplicably at nearly $3.50).  If I’m able to keep the click through rate fairly high, and continue to increase the traffic on my site, I’d stand to do pretty well for a personal blog within about a year.

Above is a graph showing my sites overall page views over a 1-year period, not counting my own hits to this site.  Obviously I wasn’t interested in these numbers until I began this experiment on January 3rd of this year, which I’ve marked with a 1. Since then the trend has noticeably angled in the desirable direction, which I’ve marked with a 2.  The number 3 on this chart is the current month, which is not fully calculated until the month is over, which is why it appears to have such a steep drop.

The only thing I’ve done differently on my blog since January is attempt to be fairly regular with writing, and as you may know I’ve been bringing all of my content to my site rather than spreading it all over, and I’ve tried to maintain a certain level of quality with everything I’ve published here.  Combining those three things is what I believe made my site’s traffic increase as it has.  My actual numbers are nothing to brag about, to be sure, but so long as the trend continues in the right direction you could say that the experiment was a resounding success.

But, was I able to accomplish my goals?  Yes.  Here is what I said my goal was in January:

“I don’t have any hard number goals that I’d like to achieve, but I wouldn’t mind being able to buy myself one lunch per month off of this site’s ads. Seems like a low goal? Remember, this is a personal Web site with a very small number of subscribers, less then five-hundred posts, and I only manage to write on here when I find the time. So how much does a good lunch cost nowadays?”

In the very first month of my running this experiment I made enough to buy a lunch.  In fact, based on the amount I paid today for lunch at Panera Bread, I’d be able to afford two lunches for the month of January’s earnings.  Success!

But wait, in February I would have only been able to buy a little more than one lunch.  Still a success, but odd that the amount I made in February wasn’t more than it was in January, since my overall page views were higher.  Here’s why; the number of clicks on ads that I had in February was only half that of January.  The main reason, I believe, this occurred was because of search referrals.  The main way I make money from ads on this site would be through search referrals, especially since I show two sets of ads on those page views (which probably brings down my CTR in retrospect).  If the traffic I get from search engines decreases over the course of the month so will my earnings.

Thrilling I know, but there’s more.

What about March?  March was, statistically, the best month this site has had in at least a year.  March was much better than February but still not quite as good as January.  While traffic from search engines did indeed increase, it didn’t increase enough to make up for the losses incurred in February, or even to match that of what was made in January.

Now we’re onto April.  You’ve probably painted a camel-like graph for yourself in your head with January and March being the humps and February being the valley in the middle.  So, where will April end up? With the month already half over, this site has made more than all of February, and almost as much as all of March.  I believe the month of April’s earnings will end up being slightly more than that of January.

What I’ve actually learned

Ads don’t have to be obtrusive to make money. The most important thing when serving ads is that you serve them to people that are most likely to click on them.  If you show an ad to 1,000 people that won’t click on it, you’ve just decreased your CPM average.  Context is also very important, but Google takes care of that for me.  However, if you’re reading this and in the middle of building your own ad system, know that properly serving an ad contextually is just as important as serving an ad to the right person.

I know what you’re thinking; this is advertising 101.  Not exactly.  I’m speaking of actually turning advertisements off if you think the person viewing the web site is not going to click the ads.  Do not even bother showing an ad to a person that will not click it.

And I’m not talking about demographics here.  I’m talking about scope.  If the person you are serving an ad to is there to see a very specific “thing”, and the ad is not well suited for that “thing”, you won’t get a click.  Plain and simple.  However, if the person you are serving an ad to is looking for something related to the ad, or is highly vested in something related to the ad, or even better yet is incredibly interested in something related to the ad – that’s when you’re going to get a click.

Here is the best example I can come up with on the fly.  If I’m reading an article on CNN.com, I don’t even notice the advertisements because I’m there to read the article.  However, if I’m looking for information, products, services, etc. that the article just happens to be about, and the ads are relevant, then the ads become part of the content.  The ads become valuable.

The second thing I learned is that having a lot of traffic doesn’t equate to more click-thrus.  February’s earnings dip is a perfect example.  Having a friend, or just about any other web site, link to you will not help the number of clicks you get on your ads.  If I was earning money based purely on CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, then it would, but not if I’m earning money solely on the CPC, or cost per click, model. (There are probably arguments to this, and I’d love to hear them.  The first thing that comes to mind is that the Long Tail will improve with Page Rank.)

Advertising will always be the most obtrusive when they are based only on number of impressions.  If I was earning money on CPM, I’d be showing an ad at every opportunity.  In fact, I’d probably put them right in the middle of my post.  This is why advertisements based on only on CPM should be replaced by poignant sponsorship campaigns that make sense.  More on this at another time.

New goals and some changes

I think I’m going to make some changes to the way I handle search engine referral page views.  As of right now I show an ad both at the top and the bottom of the post.  I think I might adjust it so that I only show an ad on the top of the post and not at the bottom.  This way I’m not showing two ads, which “fluffs” the impressions statistic, and lowers my CTR average.  I am not sure if this will help or hurt me, but I’m open to suggestions here if any of you have experience.

My new goal is that my earnings per month increases at a rate of at least 10% per month.  So if I make $1.00 this month, I want to make $1.10 next month.  I don’t even know if this is possible or plausible.  But it is a goal nonetheless, and a measure at which to weigh this experiment when I revisit it in the future.

If you have any comments, suggestions, tips, or tricks – please share them in the comments.  Hey, by commenting you don’t have to see the ads at all, so why not?

TweetStats, a way to get all types of statistics for your Twitter account (or anyone else’s actually), has some interesting graphs by default.

The one about interfaces (pictured), or “how you twittered” it could be called, seems to be a little inaccurate unless I’m completely mistaken. According the graph it says I’ve somehow interfaced with Twitter via IM nearly 400 times. I don’t believe this to be true since I do not remember ever sending a message through IM to Twitter.

My memory is more muddy water than anything – so I’m probably wrong here. And I want to be clear that I’m not totally placing the blame on this tool, but perhaps Twitter somehow logged almost 400 of my statuses as being from an IM client when they really weren’t. Who knows, who cares, still cool.

Source: TweetStats :: for cdevroe.
My Twitter account: @cdevroe.

Hello, Skitch!

Well, that was fun. I feel like all that I’ve been doing over the last few days is giving out Skitch invites and inviting more people to try it! I think we should back pedal a little to explain what exactly happened and why I’m surprised at the response.

Ever since I got my hands on Skitch people have been asking me for copies. I had told the plasq crew that I’d do an overview of it for my site, so I did, and they were nice enough to give me a few “invites” to give out as a result. Those invites, and many more, flew off the shelf faster than Cris Pearson could send them out. Based on this response, I knew people wanted Skitch as badly as I did, and so I had decided that the moment it was made available – I’d be sure to tell everyone about it.

Fast forward to this past Thursday, when Skitch was scheduled to go public beta, and I was all set to blog, instant message, and tell my contacts in the Mac news industry that I wanted them to link to Skitch. So I created a simple blog post, showing off Skitch and announcing that it was public and bam! Instant flood. So I ended up sending out hundreds of copies of Skitch (and I’m still sending them out at a rate of 10 or so an hour trying to keep up) and I’m really surprised that somehow my blog because the destination to get Skitch invites.

As you can see from the statistics graph on the right, my blog got a huge spike in traffic since all this Skitch stuff happened. And even though this is a personal blog, my blog is no slouch, so seeing such an increase really does show that people are really interested in Skitch. Read some of the comments on the release post, people are coming back to say thank you and tell me how much they like Skitch!

You can still help

I’m running out of invites. I’m sure I could ask plasq for more and they’d hook me up. However, my main reason for doing all of this was to see Skitch get out to as many people as possible. So, how can you help? Please blog about Skitch if you have a copy. Don’t link to my blog, unless you want to, but primarily link to the main Skitch site. Also, don’t be afraid to embed their demo movie on your site (it even works on WordPress.com blogs!). Lets see if we can repay plasq for their generosity, time, and effort that they’ve put into Skitch. Oh, and when it goes GOLD – buy a copy.