Visitors vs. Links

In August 2006 I painstakingly harvested data to investigate the relationship between # of links and vistors/day and the effect of syndicates. I've only shared the data with a few friends so far, but one of them has been hounding me to share the plot with a wider audience. With Matthew Hurst's post about Readers Or Links over at Data Mining today, I decided it's worth going off-topic for a day. So here's the plot:


I only included sites that used sitemeter with public data access and that were registered with technorati. Nearly 1800 different sites are represented in the figure.

How is this data related to trivialTV? Back in August trivialTV was struggling and I needed a tactic to increase readership, but I didn't have the data to formulate a sound plan. So I harvested. The data showed that trivialTV was maxed out for visitors/day for the # of incoming links at the time — trivialTV was at the top end of the distribution (vertically). That simple piece of info told me that trivialTV was well-optimized for search engine traffic and that I had to focus on links.