Phuket Gazette to become biggest website in the world

[dirtydog]

Now I admit I do quite like the Phuket gazette website, has like 4 new stories perday, a queer news section for the gays, at least I assume it is for gays, and its easy to navigate, anyway for the last few years they have had a stat section showing their daily page views so potential advertisers can get an idea of how well they are doing, and damn, they are doing well, this is from their website here Phuket Gazette – Phuket daily news, events, jobs, classifieds, yellow pages, TV

In a departure from tradition in the local market for Web services, we are pleased to publish our key statistics on a daily basis.
These statistics are prepared independently based on visitor IP address data drawn directly from the Gazette web server. The visitor counts below are presented NET of traffic generated by search engine bugs. The statistics below cover the 24-hour period ending at midnight on Tuesday, November 2, Phuket time (GMT +7).

Number of Visitors : 40,830
Number of Page Views: : 1,048,039

See, they aint shy about publishing their figures, and with figures like that they should be proud, but wait, the page views is a 7 figure number, ie millions, hmmm, now Phuket gets say 10 million visitors per year, a lot of them can't read English, so why are people taking such an interest in this site?Lets look at this realistically, Phuket Gazette are claiming to serve more pages per day than the bangkok Post, The Nation, all the Pattaya online sites, thaivisa and teakdoor added together serve perday, well, maybe not more but pretty much the same, bangkok post and The nation serve just under 300,000 pages perday added together Thailand Web Directory at Truehits.net -

Taking a wild guess I'm gonna say the fuckwits don't know the difference between page views and hits, oh well, its a nice dream to think your serving a million pages perday.

PS, we serve more pages than the nation perday, albeit not such a great achievement sadly

[dirtydog]

Number of Visitors : 40,830 Number of Page Views: : 1,048,039

So 40 k visitors viewed 25 pages each, oops nope, lets say a 50 percent bounce rate, 40 k visitors viewed 40 pages each, yep, seems likely......

[dirtydog]

Nice story today in The Phuket Gazette, they have been using their google analytics for the last 3 weeks to show their stats, seems they have suffered massive losses and are down to 30k plus page views perday.

Phuket Gazette Stats http://www.phuketgazette.net/statistics/

Below from Phuket Gazette

Phuket Media: Ethics more credible than pretensions of 'War'

PHUKET: A story on a local blog last weekend continued to celebrate a “War” which it had declared several months ago, not against, but rather on behalf of and between, two of Phuket's newspapers.

We understood the writer’s interests at the time and have marveled at his diligence in following the conflagration with regular weekly reports.

But the blog’s ‘report’ last Saturday turned ugly when its author abandoned all pretext of objectivity and entered the fray himself, hurling wild charges and innuendo at both newspapers – this one for false Web traffic statistics.

That the story was self-serving is clear, for the concluding paragraphs are devoted solely to exaltation of the blog’s many virtues.

That it was inappropriate, is also beyond doubt, its publisher having quietly removed it within 48 hours of launching it onto the Web.

We would like to assure the publisher that the newspapers he accuses have not conspired in any way to plunder his blog.

We must also assert that the Phuket Gazette does not falsify its Web traffic statistics.

When we three weeks ago implemented publication of what are effectively audited statistics, a first in Phuket, we did so of our own volition, in the belief that readers, advertisers and marketing professionals would appreciate it.

But this was not simply a substitution of statistics for traditional traffic adjectives like “huge” and “massive”. We had already been reporting our Web numbers daily for close to a decade.

Those statistics included the visits of robots, also known as ‘crawlers’, sent to our site by search engines (Google, et al), news aggregators (like Google News and Topix), and subscribers to the Gazette Online’s various content feeds (mainly news and events).

In our daily presentation of the statistics, we highlighted the fact that they included the crawlers. But as the growth and update frequency of our site accelerated rapidly over the past three years, the crawler component soared, fueled particularly by the demand from our newsfeed subscribers and a rapidly growing number news aggregators worldwide.

So we decided to turn to Google Analytics (GA) who have the ability to distinguish between human and robotic visitors, and who report only the former.

We made the switch to GA even though the lower numbers recorded by that source would not necessarily be in our own best interests. Indeed, many professionals have told us that we’ve now hived off our most compelling data for advertisers.

It’s the robots who put us where we are in the search results. It’s Google – not us – who rate us Number One for Web page importance for Phuket (an honor we’re happy to share with Phuket.Com). And it’s also the robots who carry our event announcements, business listings and classified ads all over the world.

We call upon the blogger so critical of Phuket’s licensed newspapers to publish his own Web statistics, and to perhaps review the authenticity of the word “war” when he applies it to others.

We’d have thought ‘competition’ a more honest word, albeit less exciting and effective as bait for readers.

[harrybarracuda]

Who was the annoying "blogger"? PhuketWank?

[dirtydog]

^No idea, find it funny though how they are saying they are so honest etc and yet label what I assume are "hits" as "page views".

[dirtydog]

Seems your guess was right, seems it was phuketwan, now an invalid page, part of the story I think.



Phuket's Media Wars: How to Make Your Choices

PHUKET: An interesting piece of news about the news came this week when the Phuket Gazette, engaged in a do-or-die struggle with a rival upstart weekly, carried an independent report on its online site's traffic for the first time.
It was a reversal in approach from the Gazette, which in the past - probably unknowingly - has published figures that grossly exaggerated the number of visitors its site has actually achieved.
Tweet
Now we know that according to Google Analytics, accepted as

[dirtydog]

Found a cache.


Phuket's Media Wars: How to Make Your Choices

By Alan Morison
Saturday, August 6, 2011
PHUKET: An interesting piece of news about the news came this week when the Phuket Gazette, engaged in a do-or-die struggle with a rival upstart weekly, carried an independent report on its online site's traffic for the first time.

It was a reversal in approach from the Gazette, which in the past - probably unknowingly - has published figures that grossly exaggerated the number of visitors its site has actually achieved.





Now we know that according to Google Analytics, accepted as perhaps the most reliable verifyer of Internet statistics, the Gazette has about 8000-10,000 visitors on most days.

This revelation is a refreshing development from an organisation that previously told prospective advertisers in its print version to ''expose yourself!'' to up to 50,000 visitors online a day.

Media organisations that demand transparency from others are at their best when they are transparent themselves.

It's definitely the way to go on Phuket and, as the British media phone hacking and bribery scandal demonstrates, everywhere else, too.

Precisely what this welcome change in approach means in the context of the Gazette's arm-wrestle with the News for Phuket readers is difficult to gauge, but the Gazette's new-found openness clearly implied that prospective advertisers should ask the News how their visitor numbers compare.

The News has recently completed its third online remake since the Tweedledum-Tweedledee weekly launched in March, shaking the Gazette out of years of monopolistic complacency and providing Phuket's English readers with greater choice.

The big question now is how long it will be before the Gazette's refreshing and commendably honest approach extends from online statistics to providing accurate print circulation figures.

Unlike many Western newspaper markets, publishers on Phuket and in Thailand are not independently audited, a process that distinguishes the number of newspapers printed from the number actually sold and read.

Advertising rates are usually set on sales and readership, not numbers printed, because many of the printed copies are never sold or read. Thousands of newspapers are junked on Phuket every week.

Advertisers on Phuket and elsewhere can never be sure how many copies of any publication are sold and read until they are supplied with reliable, independently audited figures.

The distinction is important because some cheeky publishers have been known to make the assumption that every copy they print is read by perhaps two, four or even 10 people.

Copies that are given away should also be accounted for separately from copies that are sold at the cover price - 25 baht in the case of the Gazette, 20 baht for The News.

With newspapers everywhere in decline, Phuket is fortunate to now have two English-language weeklies slugging it out for the largest slice of the Phuket market.

As the battle becomes more intense, there appears to be a growing underbelly struggle for connecting to Phuket events, and for sponsorship.

This can mean some events are sponsored and covered by the News, and others by the Gazette. Given the rivalry, events sponsored by one newspaper may go uncovered by the other.

Since March, when the Phuket News began, the competition has grown stronger each week. International stories that have little to do with Phuket are even being seized upon and promoted as ''Phuket Sport'' or ''Phuket News.''

We are reliably informed that some Phuket officials are now being offered payments to supply news-related information to one newspaper only, and that they are being told to not provide help to Phuketwan and to other news outlets.

Phone hacking is not yet being contemplated, but ethics are clearly now an important part of what happens next.

The Tourist Police in Patong apparently also have a new sponsor. There is nothing wrong with that. But sponsorship of official organisations can lead to favoritism that falls only fractionally short of bribery.

Where will this fascinating struggle end?

With Phuket's tourism always tenuous and the world's finances in turmoil, outcomes are always going to be uncertain.

Phuket readers are definitely now much better served than in the blank years before the launch of this independent, award-winning news, information and events site in 2008.

Phuketwan has an obvious interest in retaining and growing its readership. We differ from the Gazette and the News in that our aim is to be a non-profit news outlet and we have a single priority: to achieve change for the better on Phuket.

As Phuketwan only reports news and events, direct comparisons on online readership are distorted by the classifieds, competitions and gimmicks that the Phuket newspaper sites carry, artificially boosting their overall traffic figures.

Yet despite all the additional exposure that a print newspaper brings to brands, Phuketwan remains the first choice for thousands of Phuket's best-informed readers.

[harrybarracuda]

Had to be really. That bloke from PhuketWank is so far up his own arse he can lick his tonsils from below.

[dirtydog]

He does have a point though, claiming your serving a million pages perday when infact the figure is around 30k is a tad miss leading.

[harrybarracuda]

He does have a point though, claiming your serving a million pages perday when infact the figure is around 30k is a tad miss leading.

True, but he's still up his own arse. Any criticism of his "reporting" normally results in a tirade or a ban.

He thinks he's Reuters Phuket, the daft twat.

[Gaston]

True, but he's still up his own arse. Any criticism of his "reporting" normally results in a tirade or a ban.

He thinks he's Reuters Phuket, the daft twat.

From someone who knows - yes, he does think he's 'better' than Reuters and AFP combined. He's also a racist, sexist septic tank - but you can't expect much less from a senile old twat.

Him and a couple of cronies walk around the office taking the piss out of Thai female staff and if you don't join in - you're fired.

The Gazette blatantly plagiarizes other publications and mocks their advertisers within their pages for fun.

The Phuket News aren't much better. But lesser of two evils - view the News.

[ltnt]

It was a reversal in approach from the Gazette, which in the past - probably unknowingly - has published figures that grossly exaggerated the number of visitors its site has actually achieved.

Oxymoron...Phuket Gazette and exaggerated? this non-news paper is nothing but a commercial shill for developers, TAT, the Nation and any other semi-wanker scum that licks their arse.

Nothing could be closer to the truth about Phuketwanna be...dickheads all.

Natorious PG for pc news and opposing viewers banned.