It’s difficult to write a wrap-up post on the Heartland ICCC. My goal was to chit-chat with a lot of people, gauge sentiment and get a “feel” for the conference. That’s what I did. This post is not about the Heartland conference, but was motivated by a conversation I had at the ICCC which motivated me to refreshing my memory about the contents of Joe Romm’s blog.
While at Joe’s blog I learned Joe suggested visits to skeptic sites are “dwindling”. I was a little surprised to read the claim so I clicked the word “dwindling” and found the claim of “dwindling” is supported by an Alexa graph showing page views over a 6 month period ending in March. I then visited Alexa, used the handy “max” setting to graph Joe’s Climate Progress, Anthony’s WattsUpWithThat and my “page views” over the ‘max’ period. Here it is:
Many will notice the blue line shows my page views and those at Anthony’s blog rose near the end of the year– that would be after Nov. 19. They drop thereafter.
It’s true that if someone like Joe looks at a graph beginning in October he can mislead himself into believing that Anthony’s blog readership is falling overall. However, if you take the “max” view, it’s easy to see that page views at Anthony’s blog have risen relative to this time last year. Joe’s reports of dwindling traffic at Anthony’s blog may be the product of his wishful thinking.
What I found funnier was Romm’s suggestion that it is page views that count; this is followed by an illustration of page views per user (a different thing.) Here’s what Joe wrote:
I write to be read, and so for me — and most bloggers I know — page views are what matters. About.com notes, “Page views are the standard measurement of blog popularity and traffic in the blogosphere because that’s the statistic online advertisers look at.†Ad revenues are typically based on pageviews. The huge website Gawker pays incentives to its writers on the basis of page views.
Since Watts loves Alexa, I plotted the comparison above, which suggests our pageviews tracked online aren’t as disparate as Alexa suggests our traffic is. Why? Well, if you believe Alexa (and I don’t) here’s why:
My readers read more pages. Indeed, Watts’ sitemeter actually says he gets 1.4 pageviews per visit.
Notice the caption on that graph doesn’t read “page views”: it reads “page views per user.”
Would anyone like to see Alexa’s report comparing page views per user?
Wow! I’m cleaning Joe’s clock on this one!
Don’t worry Joe. I know the difference between “X” and “X per Y” thing can be difficult for some MIT educated scientists like you to grasp. But, it just so happens they are different.
Advertisers don’t care all that much about page views per user. They really aren’t all that impressed if one visitor arrives at a blog and reads 1000 pages during that visit. My impression is many care both about page views (as you learned from About.com, an site that exists to make money selling advertising) and about unique visitors and other factors. “Unique visitor” corresponds rather closely to Alexa’s “reach” estimate.
Using the “max” view at Alexa, Anthony has been cleaning your clock on “unique visitors” for some time:
Interesting analysis. I wonder if the page views per user is correlated to the ability of the site to act as a discussion forum. Viewers aren’t necessarily looking at lots of different pages, but the same ones over and over so they follow and contribute to the comments.
I, myself, usually have the focus to follow the discussion 3-4 times; I fear I am hurting your rankings
Hmmm, using Romm’s graph of page views per user his site has been on a steady decline while Watt’s has been very consistent. You’re the ‘go to’ person: statistically significant? 😉
I’m sure it is.
Let’s all get out a tissue and have a cry for poor Joe
Anyone here into ZZ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVK6FEVdaTY
They’re great!
Lucia:
Whenever I click the “back” button on my browser when viewing your site, I first come back to the same page I was viewing. I have to click again to get back to the previous page. This is true on Firefox on the Mac and IE on the PC.
I always considered this a minor “bug” in your site. But now I see that it’s a “feature” to improve your Alex ratings!
Curt–
I don’t know why hitting the back button does that.
I can identify two reasons for high “page views”:
1) Lots of comments.
2) The front page never runs full posts. So, people who come to the “top” always have to click to read a post. Some blogs just run a few articles on the top page.
Other than that, I hadn’t thought of this “back button” on the browser things.
It’s a bit difficult to gauge the impact of blogs. Evidently Anthony mentioning his traffic bother’s Joe enough for Joe to write a post complaining. Well… lots of blogs get more traffic than mine!
Hey Lucia, seems Joe Romm is just cherrypicking start dates for the trends.
Lucia, You attended, you met people, you interacted, you taught, you learnt, you can weight statements and opinions, and modify yours as necessary with a better informed opinion. You can put names to faces, so can they. That is beyond price.
Umm, why would anyone care what Romm says about anything? I can’t recall anything useful or insightful ever from him. I’m willing to stand corrected if anyone can supply an example.
Alan Wilkinson–
I read Romm relatively rarely. For all I know he sometimes says insightful things.
Lucia
Google Joe Romm and Lisa van Susteren.
Read and weep.
Romm is a parrot for the powers that be. When he speaks, it is not he that speaks
Re: Shub Niggurath #43709,
Dealing With Climate Trauma and Global Warming Burnout – Joe Romm, 12 May 09
Dr.Lise van Susteren on HufPo:
“Mental health professionals vigorously endorse requirements to report cases of child abuse. It is a legal obligation, but it is also a moral one.
Is it any less compelling a moral obligation, in the name of all children now and in the future, to report that we are on track to hand over a planet that may be destroyed for generations to come?
I respectfully request that we, as mental health professionals, make a unified stand in
support of actions to reduce the threat of catastrophic climate change.”
.
First being sceptic about AGW is compared with holocaust denial, now it’s compared with child abuse??
.
Wow, just wow. Mental health… Who needs a shrink here, methinks.
Popularity aside, the real test for me is whether or not the writer actually corrects themselves and engages in point-by-point debates with their critics. Joe Romm certainly does. Not so Watts and others.
Dagenstein–
I’ll have to take your word for the notion that Joe Romm corrects himself. I disagree he engages in point-by-point debate with his critics. He may engage in debate with someone like Roger Pielke who has a widely read blog.
Otherwise, he has a reputation for “engaging” critics by moderating comments heavily and often deals with many critics by deleting their comments and not permitting their points to appear in his threads. While bloggers have every right to moderate their comments as they see fit, this practice of “vanishing” negative criticisms and points made by his critics may mislead some of his readers into believing he rebutted critics points, but its hardly engaging in point-by-point debates. You may be one of the readers who has been mislead in this way.
Lucia, you seem to live an alternate universe to the one I live in. From my observations, WUWT gets a large audience who looks at one or two pages to read the headlines, and confirm what they already believe. Climate Progress gets more page views because most viewers read more pages to collect useful information and learn something. This is certainly what I do at these sites.
Anthony Watts is one of the most tyrannical censors on the internet; even if you mind your manners, if you post substantial information that he doesn’t like, he censors it. As a result, most people who follow the science, can’t post at WUWT anymore.
I was censored for commenting about the strange seasonal variation in the UAH database, using information I had gathered at sites like DeepClimate. Anthony lectured me on the evils of adjusting data after the fact, as he claimed GISTEMP does. I suggested fixing errors by adjusting the data, made a lot of sense, and suggested the biggest errors were in the UAH data. He went nuts…
But in the end, the UAH data has been subsequently revised, after AW took my complaint to Christy. What did I get for this effort? BANNED, and personally attacked (using my name from the WUWT login data). He even sent me threatening emails.
For this reason, much of what is published at WUWT is nonsense… take the recent post from Steve Goddard trying to use satellite data to critique the GISTEMP extrapolation of polar region anomalies. Most knowledgeable experts who could refute this, are banned from posting.
WUWT has more errors, and bigger errors, per post, than any site except for Climate Depot, and Denial Depot : )
PaulK2–
I’m not sure precisely what argument you think you are rebutting.
I haven’t characterized the audiences at either WUWT or JoeRomm’s blog,suggested how each behaves or why WUWT gets more total page views while JoeRomm’s blog is visited by a smaller number of people but gets a larger number of pageviews per user. I can think of all sorts of reasons why a site gets more pageviews per user– for example, I suspect I get more pageviews per user because lots of my regular visitors like to participate in comments.
Whatever the reason, the WUWT has been getting more page views than Romm, and Romm’s first quoting About.com’s advice that page views are what “matter” and then comparing “page views per user” of the two sites suggests some confusion on Romm’s part.
Daganstein says Romm “engages in point-by-point debates with their critics”. As far as I can tell, Romm does not ordinarily engage in point-by-point debates with critics but rather appears to avoid engaging critics in point-by-point debates by moderating comments heavily. Either I am correct that Romm moderates heavily or I am incorrect. Either way, my statement about Romm’s behavior makes no claims about what Anthony, Tamino, RC, Rabett or others might or might not do.
Two other possibilities:
1. Maybe WUWT has more RSS users, so they tend to hop directly into stories with interesting headlines – that removes 1 pageview, as well as removing all the check-front-page-for-something-new views.
2. Maybe WUWT is posting fewer stories per day, thus there are fewer pages to view. That seems to be true during the last two days; WUWT has had a flurry from a Chicago climate conference, while CP has had a flurry of BP bashing. I didn’t look for average days.
Whatever the behavior of the fingers, WUWT clearly has more eyeballs looking at it. Of course, what the advertisers really care about is how much people are buying, not looking at nor clicking.
P.S. Tip jar image permission problem.
You may want to try a source that’s believed to be less unreliable than Alexa.
Say, Compete:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wattsupwiththat.com+climateprogress.org+rankexploits.com/
Check out Unique Vistors. WuWT’s post Climategate baseline is higher than before, but Joe’s on the move…
BCC–
My impression has been that Compete and Alexa are equally unreliable. Why do you think Compete is better? (Compete doesn’t pick up my rise in traffic in November, which really did happen. Alexa does.)
Alexa also shows Joe catching up to WUWT recently, so the two agree on that. It’s probably true.
Neither point has anything to do with Joe’s decision to use Alexa and show “page views per user”.
Rank? To think I thought “rankexploits” was a subtle gag involving odor. BTW, where did “rankexploits” come from?
Please don’t call Romm a scientist – he got a degree, and then chose not to go into science work. He’s a writer.
I visit Joe Romm’s and Anthony Watts’ sites regularly.
One has a lot of credibility with me on climate policy, less on the science. I read the other one to find out the latest crazy.
Perhaps contrary to most folks on this blog, Romm for me is the serious blogger, Watts a pretender.
Please don’t call Romm a scientist – he got a degree, and then chose not to go into science work. He’s a writer.
you might not be aware of it, but a lot of science is done by writing.
a google scholar search should enlighten you.
Re: toby (Jun 2 02:58),
I have a hard time believing anyone can consistently read the long, disorganized, stream of consciousness walls-of-words stuff Romm writes. I haven’t ever looked at his book in the library. Did he find an editor to condense his stuff?
“A lot of science is done by writing”??? That’s the most ridiculous definition of science I’ve ever heard.
Now, political double-speak employs a lot of writing. Is that what you’re referring to? A cult promulgates itself with a lot of propaganda. Is that what you’re referring to?
Rockyspoon–
Well, presenting scientific findings definitely involves writing. Comparing journal articles to Romm’s blog would not advance sod’s argument in favor of considering Romm a scientist though.
I only have one comment to make and I think it makes the point better than even your great job with the charts.
My 5 year old son knows who Mr. Watts is.
Who’s Romm? I don’t have a clue who he is.
If Mr. Romm thinks he is superior to Mr. Watt’s in any way shape or form, why does my 5 year old know who Mr. Watt’s is but neither of us know who Romm is?
I’ve only got one thing to say and I think it sums it up better than Lucias wonderful charts.
My five year old knows who Mr. Watts is.
I don’t have a clue who Romm is.
“Page views per user” is simply an echo chamber function.
You get a handful of true believers [eg: dhogaza] who click repeatedly on one blog’s pages, and it comes out looking impressive on Romm’s cherry-picked graph.
But in reality, page views per user is a decided negative.
It’s like voting by click – a few regulars can make the numbers go way up. But ‘page views per user’ is not representative or indicative of a site’s popularity with the general public. Romm gets 6 – 8 page views per user, while Watts gets 1.4. Clearly, a much higher percentage of the public is visiting WUWT, while Romm’s numbers are inflated by a relative few clicking on a lot of page views.
Unique visitors is the key metric. The higher the number of unique visitors to a site, the more broadly distributed the sample, and therefore the more that site appeals to the public in general.
A final note: Anthony Watts’ site welcomes all points of view, without the routine, daily censorship practiced by climate progress, and RealClimate, and in fact most all of the climate alarmist blogs.
If a blog can not withstand criticism, and routinely deletes opposing points of view, it is not a science site at all; it is a propaganda blog, spoon-feeding its viewers only what it allows them to read.
If Romm, or Schmidt, or tamino, or Rabett, or the rest of the catastrophic scare blogs had the self confidence and decency to allow all points of view like Anthony Watts does, maybe they would start to get Watts’ traffic numbers. Then folks like Joe Romm wouldn’t have to mendaciously spin the numbers to try and show what isn’t really there.
I’m not sure Romm was trying to mendaciously spin numbers. I think he may just have gotten a bit confused about which metrics mean what.
I know the reason my “page view per users” is relatively high is related to the design of my blog template, the tendency of my blog to have visitors who discuss back and forth and the people reloading pages when they bet. 🙂
I think you are correct that most advertisers care more about unique visitors. Some care about click through rates and conversions. Honest – to – goodness political sites care about how many people they manage to get to vote. So, different metrics matter for different people.
David B. said: “A final note: Anthony Watts’ site welcomes all points of view, without the routine, daily censorship practiced by climate progress, and RealClimate, and in fact most all of the climate alarmist blogs.
If a blog can not withstand criticism, and routinely deletes opposing points of view, it is not a science site at all; it is a propaganda blog, spoon-feeding its viewers only what it allows them to read.”
Actually, you have this backward… RC and CP censor repetitive posts of known lies and distortions that were previously rebutted. WUWT censors comments based on the whether the new information contradicts Mr. Watts’ propaganda messages. Most knowledgeable scientists and bloggers have been blacklisted on WUWT. Even engineers like myself, have been censored repeatedly when we demonstrate an error in the calculations or methods used by the WUWT posts. Clearly, in terms of content, WUWT is one of the most heavily censored sites on the internet.
One time I managed to get a comment posted (after a week of trying) by putting the comment in on a Saturday night at midnight. The moderator must have been a newbie, who hadn’t gotten the word from WUWT HQ, and let the comment through. I quickly put several more comments in, and mentioned that I had been censored earlier in the comment thread repeatedly. Quicker than you could say “Jack Robinson”, the moderator called AW at home, and he came online and began censoring the comments out.
What a petty tyrant, one who looks up to Lord Monckton as his intellectual hero… but enough. I read the headlines and occasional post on WUWT, and compared to posts on RC, CP, Deltoid, Deep Climate etc. I find the WUWT posts riddled with easily discerned and proven mistakes and errors.
What Paul K2 is saying is simply not true.
Anthony Watts has a standing offer, not just for scientists, but for knowledgeable individuals on either side of the debate to submit articles for publication. I have seen his repeated comments to climate catastrophists, offering to publish their article if they would be willing to submit one.
That is the opposite of censorship, no?
There is no doubt in my mind that Mr. Watts would publish an article written by Mr. Paul K2, if Paul would simply ask. There is a Contact menu at the mast head of the site, so everyone can watch for Paul K2’s request.
Many of those offered the chance to write an article have agreed, and have had their articles published. They include [but are not limited to]:
Lucia from The Blackboard [surely not an AGW skeptic], Dr. Eric J. Steig of NSIDC [most certainly not an AGW skeptic], Dr. Nicola Scafetta, Dr. Tom Karl [likewise], Dr. David Archibald, S.F. Examiner columnist Tom Fuller [lukewarmer], Dr. Girma Orssengo, Dr. Jerome Ravetz of Oxford University [believes in AGW], NSIDC’s Dr. Walt Meier [likewise], Steven Mosher [likewise], Dr. Judith Curry [not an AGW skeptic], Professor Martin Parry, Co-Chair of IPCC WG II [likewise], Tilo Reber, Indur M. Goklany, Statistician William M. Briggs, Bob Tisdale, Chris Hastings of the Times of London, Dr. Richard Keen, Robert Bradley, Texas Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, Willis Eschenbach, Basil Copeland, Dr. Roy Spencer, Dr. Douglas Keenan, Dr. Rudolph Kipp, Charles Rotter, Larry Fields, Dr. Don Easterbrook, Jeff Id of The Air Vent [lukewarmer], Joseph D’Aleo AMS Fellow, Dr. Leif Svalgaard, Lucy Skywalker, Dr. Bob Carter, Dr. Tony Brown, Bill Illis, Dr Tony Berry, Dr. Syun Akasofu Of the International Arctic Research Center At The University of Alaska Fairbanks, Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. [not an AGW skeptic], Steve Fitzpatrick, Alexandre Aguiar of Argentina’s MetSul Weather Center, John Goetz, Dr. Craig Loehle, William DiPuccio, Frank Lansner CE, Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT, Prof. Kiminori Itoh of Yokohama National University, Meteorologist Paolo Mezzasalma, Pieter Tans of MLO [believes in AGW], Russ Steele, Mike Smith; CCM and AMS Fellow, Jim Goodridge former California State Climatologist, Steve McIntyre, guest blogger William F. Buckley, and others.
The majority of the names cited are skeptics, as WUWT is a site followed by the skeptical majority. But certainly not all are, as can be seen. Everyone gets to say their piece, whether they believe in AGW or not. There is no censorship, although comments are snipped or deleted for violating site policy, which is also on the mast head. There is no more censorship there than here at The Blackboard.
Furthermore, not more than two weeks ago someone did a test that was suggested by another commenter, by posting the same statement at RealClimate and at WUWT simultaneously. I don’t recall the statement, but it was constructed in a way that it could have been deleted by either site, if both were equally censorship prone. In the event, it was deleted only by RealClimate.
There are some repetitive posts on WUWT, but they are not censored either. The moderating is done with a light touch; it is better to approve a post than to be falsely accused of censorship, which is what is being done here. If anyone else doubts that, post a strongly worded pro-Catastrophic AGW comment at WUWT. If it does not have objectionable language [“denialist”], or contain a personal attack, it will be posted. Go ahead, try it. Find out who is telling the truth here.
I know Anthony Watts personally, and the idea that a moderator would get him out of bed in the middle of the night as alleged, to delete a series of posts, is ridiculous. Moderators already have the authority to snip or delete posts for violating site policy from their WordPress Edit screen. Why would they wake someone to do what they can do with a mouse click?
I think Mr. Paul K2’s comments are simply projection, and should be taken with a grain of salt. I’ve seen several similar comments lately, alleging that WUWT heavily censors. Those comments appear to be talking points. They are not true.
Try it, and find out for yourself.
I have managed to cross-post comments from DenialDepot on WUWT. It was so easy that it quickly got boring.
.
BTW, David B., are you the son of Tim B.?
Neven, no, I am much too old to be the son of Tim B. But I do thank you for verifying that WUWT does not censor comments, as is being falsely alleged here and on other sites.
David B., glad to be of help. Everyone knows WUWT is a bastion of freedom and patriotism.
sod:
LOL. That’s hilarious.
Oh, you were serious?
A lot of science gets done by going to a bar, too.
Brad–
Sorry your messages are going to the moderation queue. I’m not sure why. I’ll check to see if your IP address is in the list of “bad” IPs that BadBehavior checks. (That once happened to me. A spammer moved in three blocks away, and I was on black lists everywhere until Comcast cancelled his account.)
If you are blacklisted, I can white list you. But you might have problems at other blogs that use BadBehavior.
Propaganda rules;
We don’t care if true or not.
Romm’l ram it through.
============
Oh, and I forgot truth. WUWT is a bastion of truth, freedom and patriotism.
Neven,
As you know, I never said any of those things.
I stated that WUWT does not engage in censoring opposing comments, and that RealClimate does.
I have provided a means to test the first statement (submit your own climate alarmist comment), and verification of the second (a website set up to record comments censored by RC).
I prefer free speech to censorship. To each his own.
David B.
The data showing censorship at WUWT are too numerous to wish away. I no longer can get my comments accepted by WUWT, but here are comments to a post from last summer. My comments turned out to be a very important – eventually AW went to Christy and Spencer over my comments, and this resulted in a massive change, version 5.3, in the UAH temperature anomaly dataset. As you can see from reading the post, AW decided to go after GISS, and by improperly comparing the GISTEMP anomaly with the UAH anomaly, lampooned the GISS scientists as Laurel and Hardy (the buffoonish movie characters).
.
Over and over, the comments to this post claimed or alluded to fraud and intentional mis-representation on the part of GISS; but in violation of his own comment policy, AW let these comments go un-snipped. Later, he came back and snipped a few, so the total ranting still in the ‘doctored’ comments, doesn’t show all the wild allegations by WUWT regulars. Meanwhile, many of my comments were deleted, but I kept commenting, so some were finally accepted.
.
Later, it turned out that the UAH anomaly for June was substantially in error; and the following month July UAH reading was about to set the second highest July anomaly in the dataset; so when you read the thread, keep in mind that the GISS data stood up, but the UAH data was later “adjusted” substantially. Please note AW’s lecture to me about the evils of adjusting data in his response to one of my comments; he was “agin it”, but I was for it.
.
My first comment wasn’t accepted until July 15th at 09:00. During my comments, I posted an innocuous post linking to a CP comment of mine, summarizing the WUWT post and comments … this comment was censored by WUWT. At the same time, I posted a similar comment on CP linking to WUWT that was accepted. After I commented on the censorship (both at WUWT, July 16 at 20:18, and CP), WUWT inserted a comment saying my comment was censored, and trying to explain the reason for censoring the comment (damage control).
.
Meanwhile AW contacted me via email, and claimed I boo-boo’ed (his words). He said he had read comments I had made regarding the WUWT post at other sites, and demanded that I modify my comments at other sites! In other words, he wanted total editorial control over anything I wrote anywhere! Wow… what a totalitarian dictator Anthony Watts turned out to be.
.
In the end, WUWT regulars began attacking me personally. On July 17 at 10:07, It culminated with attacks on my motivation for posting comments; below is my response. After my comments on this post, AW essentially banned and censored all my comments since then… The problem was that I had demolished his propaganda techniques in the original post, and questioned the accuracy of the monthly UAH reports. Eventually it turned out that I was correct; the UAH monthly report was in error, as later adjustments showed.
.
Paul K says:
July 17, 2009 at 10:20 am
Mike D., you attacked my motivation in posting here:
As you can see from my posts above, the UAH monthly global anomalies fall below 0.10 in May and June in most recent years, and rise to about 0.35 in January and February each year. I noticed Anthony Watts loves to focus on UAH monthly data showing low anomalies, so I saw this train wreck coming back in early June when he first posted the May data. I knew eventually he would put out some kind of silly post, comparing UAH to GISS monthly global anomalies (which really shouldn’t be directly comparable).
.
But I could hardly believe my eyes when he put up the post three days ago with the Laurel and Hardy comedy theme, and went after the GISS scientists virtually claiming they were intentionally fabricating the results.
.
He augmented that mistake, by mixing in US temperature record data in a standalone analysis, when the subject really was the global anomaly. He put up an off-subject “blinking graph†that showed the impact of revisions to the US record made by GISS some time ago, and known far and wide, and implied those revisions impacted the global record. In fact, the impact of the US data revisions on the global record is negligible, and most real scientists, and really anyone who has followed the recent global temperature records, know that.
.
Mr. Watts was completely unaware of the seasonal shift in the UAH data, which should be surprising since he touts that temperature record, and pushes the work of Dr. Spencer. But he doesn’t seem to understand the data very well.
.
The whole affair reflects extremely negatively on Mr. Watts, and if you read the ‘kill the messenger’ mentality of the WUWT comments above, it makes many of the skeptics look like idiots. They quickly jumped on some kind of mass conspiracy bandwagon.
.
I didn’t write the belittling original post, I didn’t attack reputable scientists (except for a sarcastic tongue and cheek comment about investigating all possible miscreants, when the comments above alleged fraud), and I have tried to keep the focus on the data itself, and off attacks on scientists.
.
But this post and the comments by WUWT regulars are fair game; if they cross the line into conspiracy and allegations of fraud, then someone has to stand up and show the hypocrisy.
Guys– Please stop discussing moderation policy at other blogs. I tolerate a little bit of that. But seriously, long discussions of that are boring! If you want to post long discussions of your comments being moderated, doctored or whatever, take it over to “An Inconvenient Comment”.
Otherwise, if I continue to see 4- to a billion paragraph long historical analyses of your experience with comments somewhere else, I am going to moderate them. Then, you’ll be able to post those comments at “An inconvenient Comment” too.
Friend or foe or not,
My best stuff gets edited.
Easy go easy.
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