Hugh Hewitt is the biggest of the God-bloggers, which is to say he drives the most traffic. According to the notoriously-low SiteMeter statistics that he makes public, he has a daily average of 26,694 visitors. A visit, according to SiteMeter, is a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views. SiteMeter defines a visit much more narrowly than many similar programs, and I find that I need to add 40 to 60 percent to the visits registered by SiteMeter (As an aside, it’s also important to note that SiteMeter does not track RSS visitors and they comprise a very major number of visitors to many sites these days, though for some strange reason Hewitt does not offer RSS). The point is, Hewitt gets a lot of traffic.
One of the most important measures of the power of a blog is daily visits. Hewitt has the opportunity to impact tens of thousands of visitors every day, giving, him a significant impact in the marketplace of ideas (to borrow a phrase from his book). Another important measure is in how many visitors one site can drive to another. I would call it the Lemming-factor, but that seems cruel.
Last week Hewitt linked to my site after I reviewed his book Blog. I have very little confidence in human beings (sorry!) and will assume that I picked up a few visits because Hugh indicated that I did not like his book (which is not entirely true). I find that links to articles of a negative nature get clicked on more than ones of a positive nature. Thus I am going to assume that number was moderately higher than it would have been if Hewitt had written “Tim liked my book.”
Here is the complete text of what Hewitt wrote:
Finding Your Voice enjoyed Blog. Tim Challies did not. Sort of. Actually, I am as ambivalent about Tim’s review as he is about the book. I am not ambivalent about his web-design skills, however, which are extraordinary. If you need design help, its Tim or Sekimori. (Why take design advice from a man with no talent –obviously– for design? Because I have been offered so much advice on design owing to the incredible sterility of my site, I have had name after name sent to me by the best of the best. Challies and Sekimori are the two names that –by far– have been sent by the most people.
The long and short of it is that based on that one link, I received precisely 626 visits over the following 24 hours. Because Hewitt publishes so many articles on his site, the article mentioning my site rapidly fell down the page and was relegated to the archives (where I believe it has not received a single click).
So there you have it. The value of a link from Hugh Hewitt appears to be approxiately 600 visits. Not too shabby.
