My Akismet plugin for Wordpress has just blocked its 10.000th spam comment. It’s not much compared to TechCrunch and its 1 million spam comments, but it’s still a pretty big number, and definitely one that I could never cope with had I tried to erase all that spam by hand.

This gave me an interesting idea. How good is this number for figuring out the popularity of a site? On my peak traffic days, I’ve seen a clear increase in the amount of spam comments. On quiet days, the number of spam comments is considerably lower. It seems like a solid indicator of my overall traffic. Akismet even provides a widget that shows the overall number of spam comments blocked (you can see it in action here). Perhaps they should include daily statistics as well.

Alexa - a commonly used authority for measuring traffic - gathers data only from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. Spam, on the other hand, doesn’t choose its victims. It seeks only one thing: traffic. It’s neutral, omnipresent, and unrelenting. Of course, not all sites have comments enabled. Also, I could probably spam myself or try to artificially increase this number if I wanted to, but since nobody uses this number as a metric I doubt that anyone would do that.

Still, I’m willing to bet that as a popularity indicator, the number of blocked spam comments would be more accurate than Alexa and many other metrics that are commonly used today. Someone should make a business out of it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Web, Features, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.