Estimating Blog Traffic
In my previous post I raised the question of how many people read this blog. Blogger gives statistics on pageviews, showing about a thousand a day. But I have no idea either how many additional views I am getting via Shrook or its equivalents or how many of the views I am getting are by robots rather than eyeballs—web spiders or something similar. I gather that statistics on web pages are generally overstated because of such.
Does anyone reading this know either how I can calculate such things or whether there are sites that maintain the relevant statistics?
Part of my curiosity is personal, part has to do with wondering to what degree the internet is replacing print publication. How does the number of readers I can expect for a post here compare to the number of people who read an article in a relatively small circulation print magazine, such as Liberty, for which I used to write? I have not found any precise figures for its circulation, but my guess is between two and eight thousand. If I assume that any single article was read by half that number, the total is probably comparable to, might even be less than, the average number of readers of one of my posts here.
And, of course, the question is also relevant to the usefulness of blogs as marketing tools, in my case for my self-published books.