Trader Mike

According to Quantcast, as of November 2008, this site: “reaches over 46,415 monthly people, of which 34,357 (74%) are in the U.S. The site attracts a more affluent, largely male, 35-49, more educated audience. The typical visitor reads schaeffersresearch.com and visits barchart.com.”

Here is a link to more detailed demographic information:

For the months of AUgust - October 2008, TraderMike.net averaged 176,000 page views per month. Traffic data is publicly available at:

QuantCast
and SiteMeter.com

Snapshots the above-mentioned traffic data as of November 2008 are below:

We all know about the record volume on some exchanges yesterday. And I heard that the jump in the VIX was a record move as well. Clearly the market got people’s attention yesterday. But I have another stat — this site had a record traffic day yesterday. Usually my traffic peaks around 10 AM and slow drifts lower each hour during the day. I’ll typically get just over 300 visits per hour in the morning and that will drop to around 100 per hour in the evening. Well check out what happened yesterday:

As you can see, I was getting over 3 times the normal traffic last night. That pushed my …

I’ve been meaning to post my top referrers for a while now. Last September, when I did that survey I was surprised at how many of my regular readers originally found my site via another blog. I had assumed that most people found this site via Google… and with good reason when you look at how many referrals I’ve had from oh mighty GOOG. But it seems that most of those search engine folks either don’t come back or they don’t like to fill out surveys. In any event, this is a token of appreciation for all the traffic & link love.

What I find interesting is how low Yahoo search is in the list. For some reason, they refuse to index my site. The only hits I get from Yahoo search are from people searching for “tradermike.net”. That in and of itself trips me out. If you already know my domain name why in the world are you searching for it just to get here? What kills me about Yahoo though is that you can do a search for “Trader Mike” and my site is nowhere to be found, yet most of the sites that come up in the results are linking to me. WTF? Is it any wonder why their stock chart is as ugly as it is?

Edit: I had to stick these graphs in as well. Talk about long tail… there were 1,590 referrers in the traffic report I used. From #674 on sent 5 or less visitors.

And here’s a pie chart (click to enlarge):

Here are the top 55 referrers from April 1, 2006 through September 30, 2006 (I had to go to 55 to sneak my man Howard in). Take a look through the list and pay a visit to any blogs you’re not familiar with.

Back in August I wrote about crossing 50,000 visits. It took 17 months for me to accumulate all those hits. Today I passed 100,000 hits. So it only took 4 months to do another 50K visits. In that August post I said that I wanted to get my visits up to 1,000 per day. I was doing about 300 per day back then. Well, it looks like I nailed that one, although I wouldn’t have made that target without the help of the Barron’s article. I’m averaging 1,155 visits per day right now. I wonder how long the next 50K will take…

Thanks to Kathy Yakal and Theresa W. Carey for the kind words about my site in this weekend’s Digital Investor column at Barron’s. (subscription required) When I started this blog about 18 months ago I would have never imagined being mentioned in Barron’s. Hopefully they won’t mind if I ‘liberate’ the section of the article about my site (I’ve added some links):

Blog On
“Despite all the noise and random content in blogs, many bloggers have become sources for breaking news, fresh ideas, and expert commentary,” according to a recent Morgan Stanley report, “An Update From the Digital World — October 2004.” And so we continue to scour the Web for …

I just realized that some time yesterday I crossed the 50,000 visits (as defined by SiteMeter.com) threshold on this site. When I started this blogging back in April 2003 I never imagined I’d have as much traffic as I get now. Currently I’m averaging 300 visits per day and 660 page views per day. It wasn’t long ago that I was averaging well under 100 visits. At least now I’m at the point where the ads are covering my hosting costs plus enough extra to buy some trinkets.

I’d love to get my average up to 1,000 per day by the end of the year. That sounds ambitious but I figure if …