SFGate.com Traffic Down 11 Percent After Zennie62 Departure

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According to data from the Alexa.com traffic system, the page view traffic for SFGate.com, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, is down 10.8 percent as of this writing, which rounds to 11 percent, just one month after the new SFGate.com Executive Director Alana Nguyen blocked posting to Zennie62 on SFGate.com because this blogger pushed a blog post asserting that the mainstream media should ask Texas Governor Rick Perry if he’s Gay.

Here’s my video on the matter:

And the first Rick Perry video:

Zennie62 impact on SFGate.com traffic statistics over the past two years plus is nothing short of legendary. In 2010, Zennie62 posts were responsible for almost one-quarter (12 million) of the entire unique visitor traffic to the website (46 million).

On March 18, 2010, in blogging about Sandra Bullock’s discovery that then husband Jesse James was cheating on her, I generated over 184,000 unique visitors in just six hours and to that point (1:37 PM PST), my total unique visitor traffic for that day was 545,000 unique visitors. That comes from this email from then SFGate.com Executive Producer Kevin Skaggs:

Skaggs, Kevin to me

show details 3/18/10

You’re pageviews for today are 184k so far. You’re daily unique visitor count today across all your posts is 545k, but that’s not de-duped across your posts.

From: Zenophon Abraham [mailto:zennie@sportsbusinesssims.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 1:37 PM
To: Skaggs, Kevin
Subject: Comparing traffic – Zennie
– Hide quoted text –

Hey Kevin,

The server hit a “gltch” at 102,000 at 12noon. They restarted it. Now it’s at 104,655 unique visitors but I lost an hour of traffic. What’s your unique visitor count for me?

Thanks,

Zennie

The reference to a “server glitch” points to a problem I had at the time with Clicky.com, a real time traffic estimation system with a great interface and reliable operation – well, except on this occasion.

I generated so much traffic that it represented 50 percent of all of the client traffic for Clicky.com for that day. So, they had to terminate my service because it was gumming up the entire system. After an absence, I returned to use Clicky.com for Zennie62blog.com.

Over 3,000 Posts On SFGate.com

In total, I generated over 3,000 posts for SFGate.com between April 9 2009 and November 7th 2011, or about 3,100 posts from memory, as I don’t have access to check the exact post count. But over the time I have blogged on the site, that comes to about 3.2 posts per day. Far more output than any other single contributor, and certainly light years beyond any other City Brights contributor.

But beyond that, I made no secret of my desire to run, and to own, SFGate.com because it’s an under-performing asset. In just one year, The Huffington Post has grown to almost four times the size of SFGate.com. And the blog Perez Hilton.com gets the same level of traffic as SFGate.com, and at times more. I wanted to change that, but that’s in the past.

Now, I’m applying my technique to Zennie62.com.

Stay tuned.

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