Allow me to brag for a moment. I was doing some work on the LISHost stats last night and noticed I could see if LISNews has any impact on the biblioblogosphere. You’re probably familiar with our “Blogs To Read In…” list we’ve done for the past few years, it’s usually one of the most read stories of the year. I’ve always been really curious if being on this list in particular makes any difference to a site, mostly because the list takes so long to put together. I’m generally curious if on any given day a link from LISNews brings in any significant number of readers in general, but this post in particular seems like it should mean something.
So I won’t name the site, but I was pleasantly surprised at what I saw when I took a look at the stats, a big jump in readership. Here’s what I saw on one of the charts:
As you can see there was about a 40%-50% jump in sessions after the list was posted to LISNews. The numbers show an increase of about 300-400 sessions a day, and that has been sustained for several weeks now.
I have no reason to believe this site is representative of all the other sites, but at least I can see someone agreed with at least one of our picks. All the other numbers (hits, pageviews, bandwidth) showed similar jumps, so the site has gained significant readership from being on LISNews.
We have similar numbers
The above stats aren’t In the Library with the Lead Pipe‘s, but our experience has been similar. According to Google Analytics, we had our biggest week January 11-17, 2009 after we were included in the list of “Blogs to Read in 2009.” There was a tie for our second biggest week: October 7-11, 2008 (our debut week), which included a mention in LISNews, and December 7-13, 2008, which included a mention in Jessamyn West’s librarian.net.
LISNews is also our top website referrer, followed by librarian.net, Library Garden, and ACRLog. Anyone else finding similar patterns?