08 March 2007

Blogging: Environmental Sites Show Incremental Growth, says Compete.com

Andy Kazeniac from Compete.com informed me that they have completed their analysis of environmental websites and blog over the 13 months. Their finding? Although environmental awareness in mainstream media has been increasing over the past year it isn't necessarily translating into exponential growth for our sites.

In January, Compete revealed that "traffic to a few major environmental sites has doubled in the past five years, but the climb was not a steady one," accroding to Andy. "After that post, we received requests to look beyond the 'old school' sites, and that’s exactly what we did."

With the help of The Earth Blog, they compiled a list of 125 relevant environmental sites, including yours truly, and tracked their traffic as a whole over the past thirteen months. What we found was more of the same unsteady growth.



"A 15% growth in aggregate unique visitors over last January is certainly a marked improvement," Andy writes. "But with UV totals for this January just over 3 million for 125 sites, these aren’t Earth-saving numbers."

As one would expect, the release and now the Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth generated a spike on the topic of global warming. That said, cautions Kazeniac, "with an increase of less than 400,000 unique visitors, all the fanfare doesn’t seem to be producing a proportional move to action."

One hopeful note, Kazeniac says, is that the "sites appear to be getting stickier: this January saw a 25% growth in sessions and a 59% growth in page views as compared to the same time last year."

Read Andy's post on Compete

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