Youtube porn spawns porno tube

It is commonly known that porn is the number one attraction on the Internet. I remember analyzing the search logs at AltaVista and at least a couple porn terms were always among the top 10 queries.

The people at Pornotube.com must have figured this out too. They saw that "Youtube porn" was a very popular search term and built a porn search engine called Porno Tube. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch discovered this site and wrote about it on his blog. Otherwise I never would have found it. I can't bring myself to call them entrepreneurs, but they did jump on an opportunity.

I have been analyzing my blog traffic logs and have discovered several interesting trends.  First, Google searches account for over half the traffic to my blog. Second, guess what the most often repeated search term is? Youtube porn. I am stunned. I wrote a blog about Youtube and MySpace facing copyright challenges and filtering out porn. That blog post ranks in the top 2 or 3 results for the query "Youtube porn". Why? I have no idea.

Here are the trends I have noticed.

1. Google searches account for about 55% of the traffic to my blog. Sadly, Yahoo and MSN are in the low single digits.
2. TechMeme generates about 10% of my traffic but can spike up to 20% or more when there is a hot story. TailRank, Findory, and Blogniscient also send a fair amount of traffic.
3. CNN/Money, The Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, C/Net and Seattle PI also send spikes of traffic when they link to specific blog posts.
4. Links from other blogs account for about 10% of daily traffic.
5. New posts usually get over 1,000 views on the first day. When several A List bloggers link to a post it jumps to more than 5,000 hits.
6. Blog reader software - Bloglines (24%), Newsgator (13%), Feedblitz (7%), Netvibes (6%), RSS Bandit (4%) and Rojo (4%) are the most common blog readers.
7. After about 9 months of writing this blog and almost 200 posts, the traffic from search queries on archived posts exceeds the daily traffic on new posts.
8. The Conversational Index trend has continued and improved. My CI is now 4.04, meaning there are 4.04 comments and trackbacks for every 1 post. My CI was 3.08 about 6 months ago. This means that readers are participating by leaving comments or trackbacks which makes the blog more of a conversation. I read every comment and follow every trackback. It is a great learning experience.

Have any of you seen similar trends on your blogs? This is still a very new medium for me so I am curious about what works and doesn't work. Please share your experience.

Cheers,

Don

Comments

[Alfred Thompson]

I don't have near as complete a set of statistics as you do but I do notice some similar trends in the stats I do have. I get a lot traffic from search engines (mostly Google) on older posts. I probably don't get as much as you do because I don't have the same Google rank. I do get a lot of hits from searches that look like they are looking for porn. Those hits to the main blog almost always travel next to the photo album which of course has nothing of interest to people looking for naked people or sex.
The links I have had from A-list bloggers also send me large spikes but they travel down guickly. I have also seen that I get a lot of visits from people who follow links from comments I have left other places. A comment I left on one blog about a year ago (on how to get more traffic to your blog) sends me visitors about every week. So leaving comments does appear to get one some traffic.
My conversational index is no where near as good as yours. The interesting thing is that this appears to be somewhat related to readership volume. But it is not all what you might expect. My most read blog has a Conversatial ratio of about 1. My least read blogs (I have 4 - don't ask) which are only read by people who really know me have a much higher Conversational index that is probably closer to 2.5 or 3. So it appears to me that the more your readership grows the more impersonal (in terms of people feeling like they can comment) it becomes but that when you get a large enough readership the laws of large numbers take over and you get more conversation again. I suspect that the more comments one has the more people feel that they can add their own comments as well.

[Gary Bourgeault (thealphamarketer.com)]

Google is the most used search engine on mine also. You didn't mention ask.com or Technorati, which also send me some traffic along with some of the other ones you mentioned.

With the blog reader software, Bloglines and Newsgator are also my top ones.

[Lloyd D Budd]

I laughed that you started the post on the topic of porn and finish on the topic of ... geek porn, statistics.

[Don Dodge]

Lloyd, I write a stream of consciousness. Whatever I am thinking...I type...no planning or editing. So, my original thought was about blog statistics. Google accounts for most of my traffic and the most common search term from Google is "Youtube Porn". Then I decided to "throw a dog bone" to the porn searchers by mentioning Porno Tube, before returning to blog statistics.

Finally, I decided to title the post "Youtube porn spawns porno tube" to see how many more Google hits I would get. I will track the hits on this post for a month and report the results of the experiment in a future post.

[Lloyd D Budd]

stream of consciousness: Don, very insightful.

I was at the WordCamp conference on Saturday, and during a session on monetizing blogs -- which is not a topic that interests me much -- but Tailrank's Kevin Burton said something that I did find interesting. He suggested only displaying ads when the referrer is a search engine because those visits are unlikely to be from your core readership. This would be backfire if I am in your audience because I use Google's "I'm feeling lucky" in the location bar for most web navigation -- but I imagine my navigation is unusual.