Last week, I posted my rather poor attempt to ping every address on the net . I failed, and the code was horrible, but the result was at least somewhat interesting. Let’s reveiw here what happened. I’m going to go through what I did, and analyse clicks, sources, time spent reading the blog, browser use, java support, and my experiance trying Adsense.
*I spent 2 hours programming the terrible ping thing. *I spent under an hour writing the blog entry. *I spent maybe an hour reading and writing replies on reddit, and later sumitting it uselessly to digg (2 clicks), and stumbleupon (3 clicks, 2 were probably the site itself). *Also, I spent maybe 3-4 hours playing with google analytics, adsense, and this blog’s design. *This also cost around 2GB of my terrible, cheap web host’s 600GB of monthly bandwidth.
Here are the results:
Clicks
The entry about half way up the front page on Reddit’s /r/Programming on the 7th and somehow stayed there despite being completely shown up by a university’s project that did what I was trying to do, and far better.
Sources
People came primarily from Reddit.
Twitter
What surprised me is that four people decided to tweet about my entry:
I’m not sure if they were simply scraping reddit or not.
Time
One of the most interesting, and maybe frightening things about this was the amount of time spent on the blog entry.
If Google Analytics is to be believed, 335 hours were spent viewing the blog entry. This is approximately 2 weeks, and over 2 months of 9-5 work time.
That said, if other people are like me, I generally pile up a heap of interesting links in other tabs as I browse social news sites like reddit and then flip through them. This could inflate the page view time substantially.
Browsers
Firefox wins, hands down, followed by chrome and safari. As a web developer, this brings is a sigh of relief. You are smart people.
The 395 poor slobs on IE, I can forgive on the grounds that their employer hates them.
Curiously enough, Opera and Firefox have very high page view time. This means that their users either have high attention spans, or are adept tab-flippers. Either way that reflects well in my books. Google chrome, and IE have a relatively low page view time. I’m not sure why chrome’s is lower, but my guess concerning IE is that the IE users either have their bosses walking past frequently, or have very short attention spans.
Java Support
I make processing applets from time to time so it’s of interest to me who has Java installed.
I’m pleased to learn that about 85% had Java installed and enabled.
That does nothing to abate my burning hatred for the terrible implementation of the Java web plugins.
Karma
Nobody really cares, but I got 38 karma on reddit. Up from 1 :)
Adsense
My first though upon looking at the 7,000 odd views that one blog entry received was “can I make my $3.50 a month web server fee back?”
The short answer is no.
The long answer is:
I tried google’s CPC adsense advertising, and nobody clicked the adds because they weren’t targeted very well. I then switched to CPM advertising which pays per impression and got very little for it. My total earnings after one day were $0.01.
For whatever reason, even though I turned off add categories that bug me (such as those atrocious weight loss adds), they kept popping up. Maybe the filtering only works on text adds? I’m not sure, but either way the adds would have to be bringing in a lot more than 1 cent a day for me to inflict Evony or 1 Rule for a Flat Stomach adds on fellow human beings.
I might try commission based advertising for things that are actually good at some point. Or at least somewhat amusing. I’m looking into securing commission based advertising from RobotShop (6%) and EVE online ($7 per game purchase). I’d rather have a win win situation where people are introduced to things that might be at least mildly entertaining, and thus increasing my chances at making a few dollars :P
As it stands, adds are gone. Hooray!
