103 posts categorized "Weblogs"
Disqus quietly pushed this out in the past few weeks.
The cool thing is this is interactive, meaning you can click on any of those bubbles and get to the blog post and discussion. I've been doing that every morning in addition to my regular collection of discovery tools.
I think it does a great job of showcasing the diversity and energy of the Disqus community. Well done Disqus team.
I am into quotes. Always have been. And one of my favorite things about Tumblr is they have a specific post type for quotes:
I find quotes around the web (and mobile) and post them to Tumblr (often with Tumblr's awesome share bookmarklet) all the time. And then they get reblogged. And I reblog quotes I find on Tumblr too.
I don't think there is a better place on the web to share quotes than Tumblr. It's one of the many things I love about it.
Here's a quote I reblogged from yesterday's comment thread onto Tumblr.
Did you know that you can get AVC delivered by email every day?
I've had this feature for as long as I can remember. At least seven or eight years.
But it seems like it is hidden because not that many people choose to get it this way.
You can go here and subscribe via email.
I use a service called Feedblitz to power this. The one feature I'd love to see Feedblitz offer is "reply to the daily email and post a comment". That would be killer.
Today we are going to talk about a new feature right here on AVC. It's been running for a day or so, so some of you may have already noticed it. Right next to the comments link, there is a new link that says "disqus commenter breakdown". It looks like this:
If you click on that you will get an alternative view of the comment thread - broken down by the most active commenters. You can scroll down, find the commenters you enjoy most, click on them, and read what they have to say.
Like many of the hacks featured on this blog, this was built by Kevin Marshall. He built it on top of the Disqus API.
I like applications that offer an API to developers to build alternative views for end users. And I think Disqus does this better than anyone else in the comment space.
Given how long and busy some of the comment threads are here on AVC, I can imagine a number of alternative views that one could construct that would be useful. If anyone else wants to hack on the Disqus API and create something useful, I am happy to give them similar real estate.
There was an interesting conversation in the comments to my Retention post that I thought I'd highlight.
I can't figure out how to look at frequency and recency data in google analytics by UV as opposed to total visits. So this analysis is probably flawed. If anyone knows how to do that, please let me know in the comments.
But assuming the analysis is not totally flawed, the loyal readership of AVC is between 200k and 400k out of a total of 1.7mm unique visitors last year.
That means only 10% to 25% of the total visitors are regulars. That's not particularly great retention from what I can tell. But I sure do appreciate all of you loyal readers.
I'd like to apologize for being mostly absent during two back to back fantastic conversations here over the past two days.
It's one thing to take 30 minutes to compose some thoughts at 5am in the morning when nobody else is awake. It is entirely another to stay engaged in a two or three hundred comment thread.
I am headed to Japan with my family on saturday for two weeks and there are a ton of things that have to happen before we leave, mostly related to USV business but also a fair bit of personal business. It is, as they say, crunch time.
I have caught up on the mobile web post and I am getting caught up on the demand a plan post. But a day late is a dollar short and I understand that as well as anyone around here.
For the past six years, AVC has run display advertising in the right column. I chose to do this for a bunch of reasons. At the time, USV was an active investor in ad:tech companies and I felt that I needed a laboratory to explore trends in display advertising. In addition, the revenue generated by that ad unit was material, almost $25,000 last year, all of which has gone to charity since I started running advertising on AVC. And I wanted to support Federated Media, a company started by my friend John Battelle, and now run by another friend Deanna Brown. Federated has always exclusively sold the display advertising on AVC.
A few weeks ago, Federated announced that it was getting out of the "directly sold display advertising business" in favor of programmatic display and conversational marketing. Federated purchased Lijit a year or two ago and it has turned that business into a huge and growing programmatic (meaning machines buy and sell the ads) advertising business. Federated has also built a number of interesting conversational marketing products not unlike the advertising units that Zemanta and Disqus operate on this blog.
So like Federated, I am walking away from high priced CPM driven display advertising. I could keep running the programmatic ad units that have been on display here as of late, but I find that uninteresting to me and likely to all of you too. Instead, I want to explore more conversational marketing oriented (ie native) advertising here on AVC. I hope to be able to work with my friends at Federated on that. They have been awesome to work with over the past six years.
What will not change is that all ad revenue generated here at AVC will be donated to charity. I am not interested in operating a for profit business on AVC.
What might change is the blog layout now that the right side of the blog looks a bit vacant. Nathan and I are discussing a single column layout that should render better on mobile. More to come on that.
At the tail end of yesterday's blog post was this set of related posts:
A few folks asked me what was generating that set of links so I figured I would blog about it today.
I have used Zemanta's recommended links service on my blog for something like four or five years now. It works like a spell checker. As I write the post, Zemanta understands what I am writing about and recommends in text links (hyperlinks), related images to add to the post, and related links at the end of the post.
After using Zemanta for a while, USV became an investor and I joined the board in the summer of 2008. The company has grown a lot in the past four years and has turned into a nice business serving the content marketing community.
Sometime this summer, Zemanta added the ability to use thumbnails in the related links at the bottom of the post. I recently turned the feature on and that's why you are seeing these thumbnails from time to time at the end of the post.
If have a blog and want to use Zemanta, you can sign up here.
If you are wondering why linking out is a good thing, watch this video:
Sometime over the summer, there was a discussion of analytics in the AVC comments and Shana said something like "I would love to do a serious data analysis on AVC's analytics." So I reached out to Shana and told her that I would give her access to my Google Analytics and Disqus Analytics accounts and she could go crazy on the numbers. But I told her that she had to produce a post out of all of that work. She agreed and this guest post is the result of those efforts.
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One of the things I find really hard to wrap my head around about AVC.com is that for all intents and purposes it runs like any other media site. To me, this is my bar where I hang out, but in reality, this site functions much like many other media sites such as the Atlantic, or Refinery29. There is content, there are analytics, and there are ways of pushing out content, there are some ads and tools to push them out, there are some tools to make the community more social, but not much else. If AVC.com had a business model (which it doesn’t, the advertising money goes to charity), it would be one similar to many content sites out there: Increase Users; Increase pageviews; Sell ads. What makes this site unusual is that there is a large community of users, primarily driven by technology built by the team at Disqus.
It also leads to some interesting questions about this site in comparison to other media sites. Most content sites are still trying to figure out the role of comments. Do they ignore them? Do they not have them? Do they feature some content? Do they write about the comments? Do they reward commenting behavior? Does having a community make a difference to the business model of content sites?
On this site, it does. Not only does it make a difference, comments here are highly correlated with unique pageviews of repeat users, uniques in general (not just for repeat users), time on site by repeat users, and time on site by everyone.
One half of unique pageviews over the past 9 months have been generated by repeat users.
I wanted to see if unique pageviews of returning users was correlated with the number of comments. I used a correlation coefficient (Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient) which is a measure of correlation variables that behave monotonically, or in other words, the variables move up and down together. The correlation coefficient for unique pageviews generated by repeat visitors is 0.7973 to comments. This is a high correlation coefficient and suggests the two are linked.
To give a comparison point to explain this correlation coefficient, SEOMOZ reports for Good SEO Experiments a correlation coefficient(a linear measure of correlation) of 0.3 is considered quite good, even though 0.3 usually implies fairly low correlation. Having a community on your site is therefore way more likely to be a factor that would generate significant traffic than SEO efforts, if we compare statistical significance.
I also looked at the rate of change for the percent of returning users versus the percent of new users. They line up quite nicely. They have a correlation coefficient of .9387. However, the rate of change for new users as well as repeat users is quite small. Granted, this is a niche audience, so I’m not totally surprised. Still, it is nice to know that total user activity is very much driven by regular user activity.
However, average time on site for all users to comments is less correlative (though still significantly so), with a correlation coefficient of 0.6733. Similarly, there is correlation coefficient of 0.6848 for average time on site for returning users versus comments. I suspect the reason is that some people like emailing back replies, some people like to go the site to write replies, and some people like using Engagio to write replies. Unfortunately there is no way to directly measure which people on this site are using email, Engagio, or the site itself to reply to comments.
The correlation of all unique visitors is also highly correlative to comments. (correlation coefficient =0.8413).
This data leads me to believe that people are in fact coming to the site not just for the posts, but for the community surrounding the posts. People are more curious about the chatter and the interactions that come out of the posts than the post itself. Building out community means over time you will build out a growing site.
If you are a web publisher/media company and you are looking at this post, having a strong commenting platform (like Disqus) is going to be essential to your long-term success as a media outlet. Communities can be bigger drivers of traffic than Search Engine Optimization. Having a strong moderation/community management team in place is more essential than having SEO staff in the long term, since there is a higher correlation to factors that matter to growth and ad sales (pageviews, uniques, time one site) to having community. The reason is that people are not just on your media sites to read: They are there to interact with other readers about what they have read. Teaching your writers and your community to stick to your site to discuss articles in depth ends up causing long-term growth.
(some notes:)
1)My friend Daniel Choi, a PHD Candidate in Molecular Biology/Computational Biology at Princeton, helped me understand rho based correlations. Thank you Daniel.
2)For the sake of discussion, Disqus and Google Analytics are two different reporting tools. GA also samples when you are looking at daily data for 9 months for a site of this size. Please therefore take this post with a grain of statistical salt.
3) William Mougayar was kind of enough to give me some data about Fred to see if Fred’s presence in the comments matters. It didn’t make it into the post for a variety of reasons. Thank you William, anyway.
4) Thank you Fred for cleaning up some of the language about correlations during the editing process
5)IRL I’m a web analyst who is job hunting for my next gig while handling some side projects. If you like this post, feel free to get in touch)
Our President gave an important speech yesterday at the UN. It was a speech about speech. Free speech. This is a topic that gets me going. I have been investing in the tools of self expression and free speech for close to twenty years now. I know how powerful they are and I also know that they can be used by haters and trouble makers just as easily as they can be used for good.
Here at AVC, I have tried to cultivate a forum where all opinions are welcome. Even those that are hateful or hurtful to me. I let them stand. Where everyone can judge them and opine on them. The President said this at the UN and I wholeheartedly agree with it:
As president of our country, and commander in chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day,” Mr. Obama said. “And I will defend their right to do so.
And he went on to say this:
These are important values to state, to live by, and to protect. I applaud the President for expressing his beliefs on this subject. If we can export anything to the parts of the world that are just beginning their relationship with democracy, it is these ideas and the tools that make self expression possible. We must do this.the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech — the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.
