Monday, April 2nd, 2007...12:05 pm
Spotplex Is Broken
I’ve been looking at my stats as reported by Spotlex and they in no way correlate to reality.
The article I wrote the other day on high profile car crashes has been floating around the net and sending through a heap of visitors. My real stats are telling me I’ve had over 800 hits in the last 24 hours. Spotplex reports I’ve had 14, and only 172 in total since it was posted.
I just don’t see what Spotplex has to offer here. High traffic sites like Techcrunch monopolize the frontpage because articles are ranked by raw traffic alone. What incentive is there for smaller sites to participate? I don’t get any traffic from them, and their stats, which are the core of their ranking system, are apparently useless too.
When they are coming out of beta is anyones guess but unless they make some big changes I can’t help but see Spotplex tanking.
7 Comments
April 2nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Based on your experience, what are the engines that will truly tell you the number of hits your site gets?
I am trying to improve my site rank to get my hands on some of those money-making blog business and one of the requirements is for a blog to be ranked among the top.
Hope you can help me
April 2nd, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Hmm… that’s interesting. Based on that, I had a look at my stats for my most popular recent article on Google’s personalised home page and Spotplex reports 180 views and Google analytics reports 149 (yeah, I’m not that popular!). I guess that is what being a beta is all about though, they’ve got to iron out any problems they have.
The biggest issue in my opinion is that their front page is 60% TechCrunch. It might have been a mistake to have a site with such traffic as part of the beta alongside other smaller blogs. It will be interesting to see how that progresses as the beta continues though.
Have you notified Spotplex about the problems you have discovered here?
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Phil the discrepancy there is probably because Google does a better job of filtering out hits from search engine bots. I’ve always noticed Google reports lower numbers than every other source I get my stats from.
I haven’t notified Spotplex but I know someone from there has read this post.
I had a look around before and I can’t find much information about Spotplex. As far as I can tell they haven’t done any interviews or really explained there service in any detail. All I could find was the same basic description of the service that is repeated everywhere.
April 4th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Dan,
We have found there were indeed counting errors in our systems, especially with some of the Wordpress-based blogs. The errors are fixed now. Please check our web site again whenever you can and let me know if there still is any descrepancy.
One of the biggest complaints about Spotplex has been what you pointed out: the list dominated by a handful of popular blogs. We are going to address that very issue with new relative popularity measure which will be released in a few days. This will give smaller bloggers enough opportunity to shine.
I know there still is a long way to go and a lot need to be done. Though this might sound too corny, Spotplex is really going to evolve with your feedbacks and suggestion. Please let me know if you have any suggestion or question.
Regards,
Doyon
dkim@spotplex.com
April 4th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Doyon, glad to hear you are sorting these issues out. I look forward to finding out how your relative popularity measure will work. Is there any where we can keep up with current news on Spotplex?
April 4th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
[...] was quite critical in my post the other day about Spotplex. One of the guys from there, Doyon, popped over and addressed some of [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
[...] at The Wrong Advices also noted that Spotplex wasn’t counting hits properly. The central idea of the service is that well visited pages appear as popular on the Spotplex site [...]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.