Is spam a good traffic metric?
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.
May 7th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Spam could be subjective
Certain topics could attract a lot of spam, but not receive that much traffic as a different serious blog entry, which because of being a serious entry, does not attract spam!
just my opinion!
February 17th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I am actually quite surprised that it is 10,000. That is an incredible number! I definitely agree with you, blocking all that would be a full time occupation. I am so fed up with the spam issue that I turn off the comment feature on any static pages.
I like your idea of using the number of blocked comments as a metric for site traffic; the only thing is would this only apply to sites with Wordpress installed?
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