Lijit

It’s something that I do for my job and something that I enjoy talking about with others. And apparently, after three years of doing it, it seems I am now in a position to share a little of what I’ve learned.

A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed on this topic by Vanessa, the community manager at Partnerpedia. You can find the podcast here, if you’re interested in hearing me spout off about blogging and what everyone should consider before jumping into the blogosphere waters.

Then, if that wasn’t enough, I wrote a guest post for the BlogWorld blog about…you guessed it…the importance of small businesses blogging. I respond to the most frequently asked questions and objections that I hear when it comes to the topic of getting a business blog started.

(Also? If you’re on the fence about attending the BlogWorld conference, our company has been there the past three years and consider it one of the most important things we do.)

So, if you’re still wondering why your business needs a blog, between these two pieces, I have plenty of reasons. And only one of them rhymes with ‘boogle’.

Every year, since 2004, Technorati has published the State of the Blogosphere report. The State of the Blogosphere report is considered the best up to date source of information about size, motivations, and practices of long tail publishers.

This year, Lijit helped Technorati by supplying some information from within the blogs that make up the Lijit Network. Lijit performed the analysis on the raw data and only supplied the aggregate insights documented in this post.

Analysis was centered on four distinct areas of interest including Search Engine Referrals, Blogroll Promotion, the Impact of Twitter, Advertising and Analytics.

Methodology

Data for this post was collected from two primary sources both directly collected by Lijit.

The first source of data was the ~11K active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their publications. Lijit builds a unique search corpus for each publisher. This search corpus includes the publisher’s publication, his user-generated content, and the network of the publishers who influence the publisher (i.e., his Blogroll). This network of influencers results in a crawl footprint of over 2.5M publications that we actively index in order to maintain the search functionality on the 11K publisher sites. The second source of data used in this post comes from information gathered on those 2.5M sites in the extended network.

Data was reduced to something we refer to as the ‘typical publisher’. For some measurements, some publishers were omitted from the sample when in our opinion the specific publisher or publishers represented a singularity in the data that masked the typical publisher substantially. In addition, for some of the analysis points, we removed publications with less than 100 page views a day. Where lower page view publishers were removed we point it out. As page views drop into lower numbers some of the data begins to skew and it begins to get difficult to distinguish active and inactive publishers.

Search Engine Referrals

A typical site within the Lijit publisher network receives 27% of its page views from clicks on results in horizontal search engine result pages. As expected, the highest single source of referrals to the typical publisher site is Google at 23.5%. Yahoo and Bing were next, accounting for about 3.2% of referrals. Twitter and Facebook were nearly identical and total about 1.6% of traffic.

Lijit categorizes publications into 23 topical/vertical subject areas. The Tech vertical saw the highest percent of page views from search engine referrals at 41%. The remaining topical areas were fairly consistent with regards to percent referrals.

The percent of page views that come from search engine referrals is fairly constant with the audience size of the publication. The exception to this are publications of less than 100 page views a day that receive a slightly larger percent of page views from search engine referrals at around 30%.

It’s unclear why smaller publications get a larger percent of page views from search engine referrals, but may be linked to the ever growing length of horizontal search engine queries. According to a Hitwise January 2009 Search report, over 50% of queries are now 3 terms or more on the major horizontal search engines. This suggests that as the length of the average query string gets longer, more referrals get passed to smaller publications due to the specificity of the queries. This is a positive trend for smaller publishers.

Blogroll Promotion

Based on the 2.5M publications crawled by Lijit, the number of blogs in the average blogroll is 47, a surprisingly high number. Although not always a prominent feature on a publisher’s site, cross promotion of bloggers by other bloggers is clearly a significant factor in publication readership growth.

The typical publication within the Lijit network of 2.5M sites appears in 6.4 other Blogrolls. In other words, the typical blog is pointed to by 6.4 other blogs. The difference between a blog appearing in 6.4 other Blogrolls and pointing to an average of 47 other blogs is largely due to blogs pointing outside of the Lijit crawl footprint. The Blogosphere is a very large place.

The Impact of Twitter

Publications with greater than 100 page views a day received on average 0.83% of their page views from Twitter referrals. This percent tracked very closely to Facebook referrals at 0.80%. Publications below 100 page views a day saw a higher percent of page views from Twitter referrals than Facebook referrals.

Besides horizontal search engines, Twitter is the largest driver of referrals to the typical publication.

Lijit Search aggregates user-generated content that a publisher generates, into search results that display on the publisher’s site. Aggregating this content around a publisher’s site creates a stronger brand association for the reader with that publisher and site.

The most common user-generated content source included within a Lijit Search profile is Twitter. About 50% of Lijit publishers include Twitter in their Lijit Search results. This is a change from prior years. In 2007, 26.6% of publishers included Twitter as a content source in their Lijit Search results. In 2008, 42% of Lijit accounts included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results. In 2009, 50% of publishers included Twitter as a content source within their Lijit Search results.

Twitter was by far the fastest growing content source to be included by Lijit publishers. Clearly, publishers embrace the micro-blog format. Going forward, Lijit intends to track the percent of publishers that use Twitter for blog post promotion as we suspect this number is quite high.

Advertising and Analytics

As Lijit crawls the extended network of publications, we track the widgets and tags we find on those publications. For the first time, Quantcast overtook Google Analytics as the most frequent analytics tag found on publications. This is likely due to Quantcast tags being included in some publishing platform templates.

Comparing 2008 to 2009, there has been a 68% increase in the number of sites with Ad tags installed. This indicates to us that monetizing sites is high on the priority list of most publishers.

Last year, when we ran the analysis, Google Ad tags made up 67% of the Ad tags found. This year that percentage has dropped to 47%, indicating publishers are experimenting with other Ad networks. This is probably not an indication of publishers leaving Google but rather publishers trying other Ad networks and using Google at the end of the Ad rotation.

More Data to Come…

With Lijit’s install footprint of 11K active installed base and a crawl footprint of 2.5M publications, Lijit is becoming the defacto source of information from within publications. Starting in 2010 Lijit will publish a more comprehensive study of what’s happening inside the Blogosphere.

This is another in our series of guest posts written by Lijit employees. Mike Pritchard is bestowing the honor on us this week and if you like what he has to say, you can find more of his writing (and photography) on his blog.

So, what is a day in the life of Lijit like? My name is Mike “Pip” Pritchard, I’m the tech lead for the ad server team, and if you’re been following the blog here, you’ll realize that we’ve been pretty busy. Crazy busy, in fact, but we’re excited that we’re working on projects that are helping grow Lijit and create revenue for both Lijit and our publishers. And we have some great projects in the pipeline that you’ll get to hear about as we roll them out!

I’ve been at Lijit since October and I came to Lijit from a non-traditional background for a web startup. You see, I’ve come from a strong AI background and have spent most of my career building robots for either the DoD or NASA! Weird, but true.

I’ve built tiny robots, flying robots, crawling robots, industrial robots. So how did I end up at Lijit and why? Well, I love working in the AI field. The more we learn about biological intelligence the more it seems to be incredibly parallel in nature, the human brain seems to be a vast collection of independently functioning systems (structures of neural networks) working together in a fairly chaotic way, with the emergent behavior being intelligence, or at least what we think is intelligence. Almost like if we were to throw billions of computers together all connected to each other something would emerge from the chaos, something very unexpected. Sound familiar?

Well, that is for the future, but for today humanity has created this vast connected mass (or mess) of information and computers that we’re only beginning to organize. Maybe we’re not organizing it, but its organizing itself. Just like many complex biological systems we see in nature, it is perhaps a self-organizing system and it seems to be organizing itself around structures like social networks.

This, of course, is why Lijit is so important. Lijit is the natural evolution of this process, and allows us to search through these social networks in a more meaningful and useful way. This is why its an exciting time, and Lijit is a cool place to be…

(Photo used with CC license courtesy of: Dan Coulter)

Despite what everyone else seems to be doing, we’re hiring! Lijit has experienced incredible growth over 2008 and we are now in need of two crucial people to join our team. Read on if you think you have what it takes to hang with the Lijit crew of superstars.

The first position is what we’re calling a Publisher Support Engineer. This job is unique because there are several technical and communication aspects to it, including product support, collaboration with Software Engineers, publisher troubleshooting and a load of creative problem-solving. You can read all the specifics in our job description. One perk of the job is the fact that you get to work very closely with this guy, who is much funnier than he looks here…

And the second position we’re looking to fill is an Advertising Sales Catalyst. This person will be responsible for evangelizing our ad network, building strong relationships with advertisers, and assisting Lijit publishers in selling their ad inventory. In this role, you’ll be able to help establish Lijit as an industry leader in keyword-based search advertising and have the chance to build advertising sales across our network. For more information about what we need, check out the full job description.

If you’re thirsty for a new challenge, please let us know. We are looking for candidates that enjoy the start-up culture and are willing to work hard as part of a successful team. (And, while not required, we do appreciate a good sense of humor…) Our office is expanding, we love what we do and we can’t wait to start 2009 with some new faces. If you’re interested, send your resume to us here today and tell us why you rock!

It’s a dichotomy older than the web itself: right brains and left brains, creatives and geeks, ponytails and propellerheads. However you label the two camps of web development, it is undeniable that there is often a mutual misunderstanding between them.
As Lijit’s first and only designer I am learning just how different a creative’s processes are from those of an engineer. We prioritize differently, put emphasis on different aspects of the product, and use different language (I can’t express clearly enough the terror I feel when a “design meeting” is called to discuss php classes and database integration). But those differences are what make us a great team. We are all experts in our respective disciplines and together we can make the web a better place. But it’s not always easy, there are a few things a designer should remember should they find themselves in an engineering-centric environment.

Be the Designer
Stick by your warm and fuzzy guns and make good design decisions. Engineers will often not see the benefit of hours spent scrutinizing over a page layout but it is your duty to make everything you touch both beautiful and useful.

Walk a Mile in a Geek’s Shoes
I have spent more time in a command line during the past month than I ever would have liked to. And you know what? I enjoy it. Use your nerd exposure as a learning experience. Starting Apache via terminal is a useful skill after all.

Work as One
Having access to people who are much smarter than yourself is a wonderful thing. Use the skilled programmers around you to implement functionality that you couldn’t on your own. The nature of web design has always been somewhat constraining. It’s the challenge of designing in a box that makes it fun. Developers make the box bigger.

Be Flexible
Probably the most important advice I could ever give. Be willing to sacrifice some for the good of the product. Not all your ideas can work. Use criticism to become a better designer.

I have generalized a huge spectrum of disciplines here and in no way think that there is an easy solution to group dynamics. But I do believe that recognizing and understanding our differences will ultimately make us better at what we do.

This guest post was brought to you by Mike Bucks, one of our newest employees at Lijit and a wonderful addition to the team. Besides bringing his design sensibilities to the table, he’s also good for music recommendations and spur-of-the-moment badges.

One of our publishers took a trip and was kind enough to bring us along. Here is Calamity Jen strolling around the International Market Place in Honolulu. It helps us all to sleep at night knowing that someone is doing the hard job of evangelizing in Hawaii when our CEO isn’t there.

On April 1st (no foolin’), Lijit celebrated a milestone around our office. We hit a million page views that day and couldn’t wait to share our success with the rest of the Boulder startup community. At our CEO’s insistence, an impromptu party was thrown together to fully commemorate the event. Tweets went out and at the appointed time, we had about 20 people gathered in our office to help us with all the extra alcohol that we had sitting around the kitchen.

We marked the occasion with a shot and it was decided that when we hit 2 million, there will be two shots. Yikes. After the fact, we realized that it was also a very informal office warming, since we never actually had one of those. (You can see a video of the office tour that Todd gave to Colorado Startups here.) It was a fun time and good chance to say thanks to the folks that have helped us along the way.

And a big thanks go out to one of our newest Lijit publishers and the bearer of delicious tidings…Cupcakes Take The Cake. Besides posting pictures of amazing cupcakes, they also have a directory of where to buy cupcakes all over the country. You won’t find too many recipes, but I don’t find that problematic because sometimes, you just want to look at a cupcake. (Tends to be the lower calorie option as well…) We are excited to be helping out cupcake aficionados everywhere by providing a valuable search tool that serves up relevant and tasty results. Check out their blog for immediate help with sweet tooth cravings!

Today is BlogDay, the day set aside for celebrating blogs. (Although really, isn’t that every day?) From the site…

“BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest…This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.”

We here at Lijit love blogs of all kinds and encourage you to do your part by participating in BlogDay. Barney posted his contribution, Daniel gave his thoughts, and I wrote a little something for the event as well. If you have the opportunity today, try to read a blog that you normally wouldn’t. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller…It’s a big blog world out there and if you don’t stop to look around once in a while, something may just pass you by.