ShoeMoney vs John Chow the real winner
Shoemoney has beaten John Chow in the first ever “How many of my subscribers can I get to read my blog twice” contest by getting 4,400 readers on the last day.
People are speculating that Shoemoney was using fake figures all month but looking at the cached versions of his page in Google that wasn’t the case. Another tactic might have been having a seperate feed just for email users and redirecting it on the last day but again Google cache rules this out.
Looking at the data below it seems that while Shoemoney has more subscribers the “reach” metric (showing the number of people who either read the feed or clicked through to the blog post) is almost the same as Johns.
| Shoemoney | |||
| Date | Circulation | Hits | Reach |
| 25th Oct | 12770 | 28102 | 2379 |
| 26th Oct | 12779 | 27573 | 2166 |
| 27th Oct | 12708 | 25391 | 1800 |
| 28th Oct | 12740 | 24877 | 1833 |
| 29th Oct | 13600 | 29150 | 2270 |
| 30th Oct | 18003 | 29729 | 2348 |
| John Chow | |||
| Date | Circulation | Hits | Reach |
| 25th Oct | 13061 | 28125 | 2369 |
| 26th Oct | 13058 | 28216 | 2418 |
| 27th Oct | 12799 | 24715 | 1884 |
| 28th Oct | 12887 | 24601 | 1942 |
| 29th Oct | 13317 | 29349 | 2494 |
| 30th Oct | 13276 | 28202 | 2374 |
Septembers data
Just for fun lets look back at the same data for September to see who has really won the contest.
| Shoemoney | |||
| Date | Circulation | Hits | Reach |
| 25th Sept | 11012 | 25342 | 1904 |
| 26th Sept | 11105 | 24571 | 2008 |
| 27th Sept | 11122 | 24666 | 1404 |
| 28th Sept | 10999 | 21381 | 1211 |
| 29th Sept | 10762 | 20805 | 922 |
| 30th Sept | 10833 | 21908 | 1232 |
| John Chow | |||
| Date | Circulation | Hits | Reach |
| 25th Sept | 8508 | 24960 | 377 |
| 26th Sept | 8455 | 23839 | 391 |
| 27th Sept | 8817 | 26090 | 414 |
| 28th Sept | 8688 | 22477 | 293 |
| 29th Sept | 8410 | 21902 | 359 |
| 30th Sept | 8585 | 23067 | 253 |
From this data it seems that although Shoemoney has gained the most subscribers John Chow has had a ten-fold increase in the number of people who actually read his feed. I know which one I’d rather have.
Back in 1999 web developers used to be able to double the number of hits a site was getting by just adding a few 1 pixel clear gif images to every page. Management saw that hits were up and everybody was happy. Then, a couple of years later, people started to track unique visitors and suddenly hits didn’t matter any more. Should subscribers go the same way as hits or is Shoemoney a worthy winner?
Categories: Blogging, Marketing
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Interesting find, where did you get the reach figure from?
I’m looking forward to hear from Shoe what he did on that final day, I just can’t see what he did publicly making that big a difference.
Al November 1, 2007 3:14 pm | Reply
A quick suggestion for you, a subscribe to comments tick box would be good
Al November 1, 2007 3:26 pm | Reply
I used the Feedburner API, luckily they both have stats enabled and public.
I don’t run WP so a subscribe to comments might be tricky, I’ll get coding.
Patrick Altoft November 1, 2007 3:55 pm | Reply
Interesting. Right now they both get even more, because of the whole buzz around the result of competition.
Amazing
Kacper November 1, 2007 5:34 pm | Reply
The real winner is the winner that won the competition and that is Shoemoney. John Chow has a tendency to use flashy titles to get readers to click through, much like he is gaming blogrush to only show the best headlines instead of his normal ones.
What would you call it?
Mubin November 1, 2007 5:35 pm | Reply
Joost de Valk made a nice graphic interface to compare feedburner feeds.
Check this..
Available at here
Sander November 1, 2007 9:03 pm | Reply
Interesting. I didnt know John Chow was gaming BlogRush for best headlines on the widget. Where did you get this info from?
Althaf November 2, 2007 3:29 pm | Reply
The one thing that gets me though is that Shoe was encouraging people to sign up in multiple feed readers to get more entries into a contest. All’s fair, but I think that his numbers may be inflated considering the contest got multiple subscriptions per person.
Jon November 2, 2007 5:29 pm | Reply
I think they both won, cause they both got a heap of new rss readers on their blogs.
Thomas Sinfield November 3, 2007 5:06 pm | Reply