URL Pulse

In my daily perusal of statcounter, I discovered something I had never heard of called URLpulse. The hit came from Ottawa, Canada, home of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who have shown an interest in our blog since we first wrote bout the Quebec encounters.  So I clicked on this link and learned a whole bunch of statistics about blogs and websites.

URL pulse uses a particular algorhythm to  arrive at the conclusions they present on their website – how many daily and monthly hits your website or blog receives, from which countries, some of the key words, all sorts of weird tidbits. We use one such site like this that tracks book sales on Amazon, using an algorhythm. The tally isn’t always exact – it’s sometimes way off. But it was accurate enough to tell me that when my publisher lowered the ebook price  of Esperanza to $2.99, it made a substantial difference in my ebook sales – hundreds in a single month. When they jacked the price up again to $11.99, sales fell sharply.

On URLpulse.co, your website or blog’s net worth is calculated according to how many hits you receive. Guess who number 1 is in the US and worldwide? Google. Each month, more than 64 billion pages are viewed, it receives more than one billion monthly visits, it has more than 9 million external links, and it’s estimate worth is $1.39 billion.

Facebook is number 2 in the U.S and worldwide. Monthly pages views: over 61 billion, with monthly visits at nearly 2 billion, with more than 13 million external links. Estimated worth? $1.29 billion.

Yahoo comes in at number 4 in US and worldwide with more than 17 billion monthly pages views, more than 2 billion monthly visits, worth $1.86 billion.

At this point, I wondered about number 3. Amazon? Nope, they come in at number 5 in U.S., 111 worldwide, with more than 11 billion monthly page views and more than 400 million monthly visits.Estimated worth? $304.45 million.

The iTunes website? It ranks 22 in the U.S., 26 worldwide.

At this point, I got curious about our industry – writers, publishers, agents.  Random House, one of the largest publishers with multiple imprints, is ranked at 5,829 in the U.S., 21,339 worldwide, with more than 2 million pages views a month, less than a million monthly visits, and its estimated worth is slightly more than half a million bucks.

Well, okay, how about JK Rowling and Stephen King? Rowling comes in at over 59,000 in the U.S., over 155,000 worldwide. Monthly page views number over 400,000 a month, with monthly visits at slightly over 165,000. The estimated worth of the site is $119,801.56.

This is where I began to think that maybe these algorhythms don’t work well. Rowling is the first billionaire author, her books have sold millions. Then I took a look at stephenking.com. It’s ranked at 17,177 in the U.S., 82,333 worldwide, with over a million pageviews a month, less than 200,000 monthly visits, with an estimated worth of $136,603.33. Really? That’s it for the great Stephen King?

I encourage you to check your own website or blog. Not every single one is listed, but we found ours – not the blog, but the website. Our website  is fairly static; we add stuff when the occasion arises. The blog, on the other hand, is a nearly daily endeavor. So these statistics apparently include the website and the blog and, according to our statcounter, they aren’t very accurate:

Our monthly visits run between eight to ten thousand. These include unique and repeat visitors. I’m not sure about the page views; the above figure seems too high, but I’ll have to keep closer track in the future. What really made me laugh about all this is the value placed on each visitor – less than a quarter. C’mon, the knowledge, information and insight that visitors and commenters provide are incalculable. Where do those attributes enter into algorhythms?