Carnivorous Conservative has interesting analysis of SiteMeter statistics:
Who is read “more”, for example, Andrew Sullivan, Powerline, Protein Wisdom or Ace of Spades? Depending on how you want to interpret the numbers – and with the caveat that I’m no internet know it all – $20 says you probably guessed wrong. What if I told you that at least in one measure the numbers actually prove that both PW and ACE individually beat Powerline and Sullivan COMBINED!!
I think his methodology is sound, as is his logic. The only question, as always, is just how accurate SiteMeter’s data actually is…
Update: The Commissar points out one potential issue with the analysis: the large number of “zero-second” visits. I am fairly sure that zero-second visits represent visits where the user simply hit one page — since there is only one timestamp, there is no way to calculate how long they were viewing the blog overall.
Also, another interpretation for Carnivorous’ finding that Protein Wisdom receives more blog reader-time than Powerline: maybe Protein Wisdom fans just read really, really slow…