I figure most of you here read USS Clueless, so you will have read Steven Den Beste's essay on blogrolling. As one of the lucky few who was on his blogroll until he refreshed it, I've always wanted to do an analysis of the actual benefit of the link. A full analysis will have to wait until more time has passed so I have more data following the removal of this blog from his blogroll.

So I will limit myself to just a short observation now, based on the aggregate statistics without delving into the raw logs. Steven Den Beste argues that having a short blogroll makes any single entry more valuable. That certainly sounds plausible, but ideally I'd like to be able to quantify it by comparing incoming visits from different blogs. Again, a fuller analysis will have to wait, so now I'll just focus on the two extremes: Den Beste and Samizdata. While Den Beste had a very short blogroll, Samizdata's stretches as far as the eye can see, to the horizon and beyond and then wraps itself around the planet a few times. During the month of April I had a total 1052 incoming hits from Den Beste, while I had 64 from Samizdata, which works out at 35 hits/day from Den Beste and 2 hits/day from Samizdata.

The other part of the story is the number of visitors the referring site gets. Den Beste's counter for yesterday stands at 8795. On weekdays he gets more hits. Assuming he gets 10,000 hits a day on average, that means about 0.3% of his visitors clicked through to here. Unfortunately, Samizdata does not have an open counter with access to the history. Its counter currently shows a total of 687,078, so I'll check back in a few weeks to determine an average. I'll also include other referring blogs in the statistics to see whether any relationship can be determined between blogroll length and click-through.

Addressing the concept of stickiness is going to be harder, but with some log-mangling it should be possible to address that as well, or at least give a first-order approximation.

UPDATE: I emailed Steven to inquire about aveage page loads, and he says that he's getting around 15,000 on weekdays and about 10,000 on weekends. So let's say it's 13,500 per day on average that works out to about 0.26% click-through on the blogroll. Of course, these are hits, not unique visitors, but that goes for the Samizdata numbers as well.