Gawker
Last week, Newsweek ran a brief "Catch Up on Hot Blogs" column. They suggested that readers check out Perez Hilton's celeb-watching website because "the snarky one gets 105 million page views a month. That's hot." Other articles over the past few months have given estimates for his traffic ranging anywhere from 2 million page views daily (Entertainment Weekly) to 4.5 million page views a day (Globe and Mail) to a whopping 4 million unique visitors a day (Stuff, pictured). He's gotten lots of ink from the mainstream media lately; in addition to reporting on his ongoing legal drama (he's being sued by a number of photo agencies for using their photos without permission), everyone seems to be in awe of his seemingly astronomical traffic numbers. And the kids love him! He's being lauded as, of all things, a musical tastemaker in addition to a gossipmonger. But how much traffic does he really get?
ComScore, one of the two major internet tracking and market research firms, calculated that PerezHilton.com had nearly 1.7 million U.S.-based unique visitors in May. The other, Nielsen/NetRatings, comes in almost exactly the same—they say that just over 1.7 million people in the U.S. visited his site in May.
Where Perez really blows up in this data is in the number of page views.
Nielsen counted around 33 million U.S.-only page views for Perez in May. According to (notoriously unreliable) online traffic-counter Alexa, 60% of Perez's audience comes from the U.S., which would give him, by those wacky numbers, total page views for May of 55 million. (Alexa says something similar for Gawker about international traffic; we think instead that 90% of our traffic is from the U.S., so we take these country distribution numbers with a grain of salt. Also: Nielsen says that Perez had just 98,000 unique visitors in the U.K. in May.)
ComScore gives Perez 48 million U.S.-only page views for May. With additional international page views, hey, that's a lot! But it's still not 105 million—and sure not 4 million uniques a day.
One sort-of measure of traffic is Blogads, which is a clearinghouse for blog advertising—if you want to advertise on, say, a bunch of gossip blogs, the site lets you do it with a few clicks, providing the ad rates and the promised number of impressions in a week that the site can offer. This site is the only one whose statistics seem to align with Perez's—the ad at the top right-hand column of his site goes for an $9,000 for a week, with a promised 26 million impressions each week.
But just how does Perez manage to rack up even that many page views anyway? By the ComScore numbers, each visitor would have to be looking at about 26 pages, or, obviously more likely, returning that many times as "visitors." Here's to retention of visitors! The kids like it, the kids come back.
(To understand the numbers for other sites: Nielsen calculated that Gawker had 851,000 unique U.S. visitors and 12.8 million U.S. page views in May; this definitely differs from other estimates; Google Analytics said we had 9.7 million page views in June, with 3.2 million "visits" and 1.4 million of what they call "absolute unique visitors.")
Perez also had a big jump in traffic over the winter. This graph is of uniques on top and page views on the bottom:
Some sites—Drudge, New York magazine, and Slate among them—have a sneaky automatic refresh, which forces an unattended page to reload on the user's computer, thereby delivering free additional page views. If you look at his traffic from over the winter, as in the graph above, you might assume that was something he'd installed to account for those big jumps in November and December. But as near as we can tell, Perez doesn't have anything like that. In fact, this looks like an insane growth in popularity. Go figger.
He currently lists at number 21 on the Technorati list of 100 most linked-to blogs. (It's surprising he ranks this high, as others have pointed out.) Michelle Malkin comes in on that list at #11; her traffic, as per Sitemeter, is 4.5 million page views, with 3.6 million visitors last month. Boing Boing ranks at #2 on that list; that site's internal stats say that it got 2.8 million unique visitors and 24.5 million page views last month.
Of the outfits that measure traffic, Nielsen/NetRatings uses a method similar to how it counts television viewers: It measures audience data based on a recruited audience of 30,000 and extrapolates from that. Nielsen claims to be more accurate than most websites' internal traffic monitors because it excludes bots and other web crawlers that could artificially inflate traffic.
ComScore claims to have a roster of more than 2 million people who have agreed to allow comScore to "confidentially capture" their browsing behavior. ComScore has its own calculation issues.
Alexa, which calculates traffic based on the behavior of people who have downloaded its toolbar, is also suspect, since the sites that download its measuring toolbar aren't audited.
Because of these different metrics, all sites, Perez (and Gawker) included, have inconsistencies in their traffic numbers. (For example, while Nielsen reported that we had 12,771,000 page views in May, SiteMeter counted only 10,319,781 page views that month. So it's probably safe to say that we had somewhere in that range.)
But what's head-scratching is that the numbers that Perez reports, the numbers that end up in print, are so much higher than almost any traffic stats seem to indicate. We know the internet is all confusing and crazy to the journalists of the world—but why do his traffic stats get repeated, without apparent question or research, by so many news outlets?
Soon it might not matter anyway. Apparently it'll be all about how much time people spend on your site in the future. Page views? That's so last year.
Comments
That stat-heavy report would have gone done a whole lot easier with a photoshop dollop of cum.
It is called a publicist.
What the reports DON'T mention is that 30 million of those 'impressions' were logged by Nicole Richie.
jesus christ. i may have to dress like a fireman, come there and chloroform all of you, tape you all to a bed and watch TV while you pretend to be passed out or something. what the fuck was that all about?
good god almighty.
TL;DR
@rarus: There has been a disturbance in the electro magnetic field of the Blogosphere today and many of us are actually writing about non-snarkey things. I have no idea why this has occurred, but like an unexpected check in the mail I am enjoying it very much.
Hey, I know. It's that retarded "eyewonder" thing that Gawker and Defame have now, which defiantly reload the page you're currently on when you hit the "back" button. By the time my four remaining brain cells trigger enough to go "dammit!" and hit view/goto/gawker.com, that's at least an additional 3.
net/net, he's pulling in some heavy change for being the queen bitch he's always dreamed of being.
i feel like you just tried to explain wikipedia to my mom. why is this here?
Those Neilsen changes really are going to change the content, aren't they? Hit-and-run snark won't be the money-maker anymore - instead it's web analytics and Dylan quotes. We will all become deep thinkers, instead of coffee-spewing or vomit-throated (huh?) cubicle rats. The first one now will later be last...
I'd be interested in finding out how much cash money he's making on this site...In particular, how much ads go for and what other revenue he's seeing as a result of the site's popularity.
Like the crapola book he's co-writing...Did he get an advance for that?
I'm gonna have to go with Teen Talk Barbie on this one: "Math is hard". Could this have been explained with sock puppets or something? I like sock puppets.
Maybe all that traffic will run his ass over.
His site traffic jumped last winter because that's when Britney Spears got divorced and imploded. Where else can you get up to the second briefings with a "dollop of cum"?
@backslider: sheesh, don't talk like that when there's an american apparell ad right above you.
Those ad impression numbers from Blogads are the best proxy for pageviews you are going to get unless he lets you parse his log files. (Translation for non-geeks: Letting Denton poke around Perez's doughnut turds with a fork.) Forget unique visitors, a dicey number using any measurement system, but the guy is getting roughly 30 million pageviews a week! Go ahead and make assumptions that his actual "audience" is much smaller, that it's the same commenters every day, and they just refresh all day long but...well, I don't think you want to stare too long in that mirror.
Does the uptick in viewership during the end of last year coincide with Perez Hilton's copyright-infringement-type legal woes?
He got a lot of publicity for that. Just an idea.
first!
Gawker, you are SO hotter than Perez. He may get more page views, but you're way better looking. And a better cuddler, too.
Phenomenal article. THIS is media reporting, baby. Just wanted to voice my unnecessary and ultimately purposeless approval.
No coincidence about his web name, and he will drop off the face of the earth just as soon as Paris does. Please, soon. He manipulates his site as most commercial blogs do - a teaser, click here to see who it is! Another registered unique hit.
I'd love to know if his advertisers get their money's worth. They're a fairly crappy bunch who wouldn't get my dollars anyway. He's awesome at self-promotion and in serious danger, I hope, of being put out of business for ripping off copyright pix.
In two years, the newbies on this site will be laughing at us because we once knew who Paris Hilton or Perez Hilton were. Meantime, my guess is he's going to be a regular on The View, because BaBaWaWa is close to the Hiltons and so is our slimy little illiterate. He'll never succeed with the View's target audience. They are over 15 and can spell.
@stew: funny!
The people lauding him as a "musical tastemaker" are the same ones paying him to plug their artists' music. I'm sure this piece of shit never even heard of NME a year ago.
paris hilton lies! shock!
his hit numbers oddly coincide with his weight on his manscape profile.
@polypam: yeah. mika's soundscans aren't exactly impressive. and it's not like he wasn't promoted up the wazoo everywhere else. (vh1 you oughta know, anybody?) this whole 'perez hilton as musical tastemaker' meme is ridiculous and an obvious attempt by his handlers to reposition him once he gets screwed by all the stolen-photography lawsuits. the fact that media outlets are picking up on it is just more evidence that most reporters and editors have no clue about music-related anything at all.
(and amy winehouse's success doesn't count. universal promoted the shit out of her to every other media outlet, too.)
wait, i just thought of something: perez would be a perfect fit at stolen transmission!
nothing snarky to say here....great piece doree. just great.
At the risk of admitting to being a Perez reader, I'll venture a guess as to the sudden jump in page views: at one point last year, he started doing a "If you're not easily offended, click here" link at least twice a day, sometimes more. Meaning every visitor to the site was counting for at least 2 page views every time.
Somewhere in the city, Jessica Coen just coughed out bong hit.
20 minutes.
And I still don't really understand any of it.
Doree wins!
Why did perezhilton.com have a huge jump in traffic last November and December? Two words: Britney's vagina.
Perez' site was one of the first, and most publicized, places you could see those uncensored pics.
I, for one, had never heard of Perez Hilton or his web site before I clicked a link to the Brit-twat pics posted there.
@stew:
hah! a dollop of cum for you. "FIRST YOU FUCKERZZZ!" might've been better.
Has anyone mentioned yet that Dlisted is five times as humorous, four times as prompt, three times as original, and half as full of ridiculous self-serving fluff?
Additionally, has anyone noticed how sad it is to watch Perez trying to be funny? I can't tell if he's really not trying or if he's just slow.
Be honest. Denton is responsible for this.
actually very interesting read. BUT i still blame gawker for bringing that twirp to my attention in the first place. i guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. might as well be from a mocking source rather than one that spits out the crap he sprews.
mario lavandeira?
what is that? Mario Washerwoman? Mario Laundromat?
Dirt 100 - a ranking of top gossip blogs puts Perez Hilton at #3.
[www.dirt100.com]
I've read Gawker in Amsterdam, Barcelona, London and am currently reading at work in Paris.. Does that make me the entire 10% of your international traffic?
Haterz.
Kidding. I've been waiting for an excuse to use it. I don't understand the popularity of that site. It's not user friendly and he puts up pictures of himself way to much.
Perez, if you're reading this: why are you chunky? And not even in that hot bear sort of way? You look like the kind of person who eats Costco-sized PB out of the tub. Do you get any action, or are gay men not as easily impressed as women?
@Joe_Welcome: I was thinking the same thing. Looks Portuguese, right? But then shouldn't it be Peres Hilton?
@In Other News...:
:( ooops. oh, well, at least I get a cum dollop
I'm late, whatever... this piece is grrreat!
@DonPardoCalrissian: Not Portuguese (hyess, score one for the gene pool), Mario here's Cubano and I think Lavandeira's straight Spanish.
I tried to post a comment earlier, but apparently it didn't get through. Let me add my compliments, Doree. Great insight into a process the old and infirm among us little understand.
To further support Gawker, I have purchased one of those butts you advertise.
Oh Christ. I hate it when you guys to posts like this. It's beneath you. You have valid points, but it just comes off as sour grapes.
I think pot should be illegal solely because I find potheads annoying, but maybe y'all should start smoking again. It might chill you out a little bit.
@Kona: Whaa? Did we read the same post? Did you actually read the entire thing? No asterisks even!
I can't let the silly quasi-related pothead jab punctuate this post. Perhaps you should take your own advice?
if only he could get those numbers over to his gay.com profile!
womp.
I just want to say I hate Michelle Malkin.
If you would like to read my painfully long, painfully detailed account on a past Gawker post of this execrable piece of shit's rise to the "top"--click here. I can't be bothered to plagiarize myself over this disgusting Frankenberry kiss-ass.
This is some real inside baseball. My blog gets 200 visitors and 300 page views a day. My head hurts imagining all those other zeroes.
I fell asleep halfway through your piece. When will the Cliff Notes version be published in case there's a pop quiz?