{"id":9268,"date":"2010-02-10T07:00:49","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T15:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/?p=9268"},"modified":"2010-05-03T00:03:55","modified_gmt":"2010-05-03T08:03:55","slug":"fake-fashion-blog-traffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/style\/fashion\/fake-fashion-blog-traffic","title":{"rendered":"Fashion’s Online Numbers Game: Faking an Audience"},"content":{"rendered":"
“The elfin teenager…has amassed an impressive following of 4 million readers with her blog Style Rookie.” – London’s Daily Mail<\/a> on Tavi<\/p>\n “I have no where near<\/em> 4 million readers.” – Tavi Gevinson<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>Despite a straightforward statement to the contrary, wildly inflated numbers about fashion blogs and websites abound. Sometimes the numbers come from the bloggers and websites themselves – with no verification, other times they’re seemingly pulled from thin air.<\/p>\n Let’s make something clear from the start: we firmly believe that traffic numbers aren’t the only measure of success, or even the best measure. It’s why we rank blogs by influence<\/a>, and why a high traffic blog like Coco Perez doesn’t overtake a lower traffic blog with a more engaged audience in our ranking. We are of the belief that the best blogs or sites are not necessarily those with the highest number of uniques or pageviews.<\/p>\n We also know that traffic measurement sites, directly installed ones like Quantcast included, can miss visitors.\u00c2\u00a0 Even programs like Google Analytics don’t always record every visit. Panel based measurement services like Hitwise and ComScore can be entirely inaccurate for smaller sites with less than 1 million visitors per month.<\/p>\n That said, writers and publishers are inflating numbers for fashion blogs and websites at a scale that would put Bear Sterns to shame.<\/p>\n Take, for example, Dirrty Glam. In a recent writeup on Fashionista<\/a>, the site claimed 1 million users per month. In comments on the story we raised doubts about this number. Lauren Sherman, editor, explained “I actually had our writer double check that it wasn’t pageviews because it would make a heck of a lot more sense. But they insist it’s uniques.”<\/p>\n <\/a>We’re going to insist that Dirrty Glam lied about their traffic when speaking to Fashionista, or defines a unique visitor as something completely different than the rest of the web. While traffic estimates are rarely 100% accurate, it’s nearly impossible that a site with 1 million unique visitors per month would be ignored by all of them. Yet Quantcast<\/a> has no data to show, Alexa<\/a> puts their overall traffic rank below the top 1 million sites on the web, and Google Ad Planner has no information on the site.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong> (05\/03\/10): Dirrty Glam editor Alie Suv\u00c3\u00a9lor contacted us with a copy of Dirrty Glam’s press kit which lists stats at 1,000,000 hits per month (which is plausible), not 1,000,000 visitors. The Fashionista interview was translated from French to English, and Suv\u00c3\u00a9lor says the correct measurement was lost in translation, not intentionally stretched.<\/em><\/p>\n The next imaginary traffic number comes from StyleSpot, a Los Angeles based celebrity style site launched last year – and it’s a whopper. The primary source of a recent Wall Street Journal article on which celebrities influence consumer behavior, the site claims to have approximately 10 million unique visitors per month. We aren’t saying they’re lying – okay, we are. We could link to Quantcast and Alexa, but we’ll summarize here: Style.com, Conde Nast’s nearly 10-year-old, well promoted, well established, very well linked fashion site, receives around 1.8 million unique visitors per month according to Google Ad Planner. Yes, StyleSpot claims to have nearly 10 times the audience of Style.com<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Really? That has to be a misprint – perhaps they meant 10 thousand. No? We contacted StyleSpot and Christina Brinkley, the author of the Wall Street Journal article, for comment but haven’t heard back.<\/p>\n
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