ShoeMoney vs John Chow the real winner

by Patrick Altoft on November 1, 2007

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?

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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }

Al 01 Nov 2007 at 3:14 pm: 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 01 Nov 2007 at 3:26 pm: A quick suggestion for you, a subscribe to comments tick box would be good
Patrick Altoft 01 Nov 2007 at 3:55 pm: 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.
Kacper 01 Nov 2007 at 5:34 pm: Interesting. Right now they both get even more, because of the whole buzz around the result of competition.
Amazing
Mubin 01 Nov 2007 at 5:35 pm: 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?
Sander 01 Nov 2007 at 9:03 pm: Joost de Valk made a nice graphic interface to compare feedburner feeds.

Check this..

Available at here
Althaf 02 Nov 2007 at 3:29 pm: Interesting. I didnt know John Chow was gaming BlogRush for best headlines on the widget. Where did you get this info from?
Jon 02 Nov 2007 at 5:29 pm: 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.
Thomas Sinfield 03 Nov 2007 at 5:06 pm: I think they both won, cause they both got a heap of new rss readers on their blogs.