A lot of noise was made last week with the launch of the Techmeme leaderboard - a list of technology centurions on the popular technology news aggregator, built by Gabe Rivera (here's an interview with Gabe by Don Dodge.
On one hand Techcrunch's Mike Arrington suggested that it would kick Technorati in the goolies, while Scripting.com's Dave Winer has complained that a top 100 list just makes gaming Techmeme more likely.
But in taking a swipe at the diminishing influence of the biggest sites on the leaderboard, Winer also inadvertently points out something else that is crucial: for all that Valley-centric news junkies claim Techmeme as a crucial aggregator, it simply doesn't refer much traffic. The Guardian features on Techmeme's leaderboard - at position #57 as I write this. But for us, it represents a tiny proportion of referral traffic.
I'm not going to disclose numbers - the stats dominatrix here at Guardian Dungeons would have me eating gruel for years if I did - but suffice it to say that Techmeme doesn't rank in the top 100 referrers to the Guardian's technology pages.
In the past three months, our biggest referrers included the Drudge Report, those cheeky beggars at Digg, Google News, Reddit and the Huffington Post. Further down the list I see StumbleUpon, Slashdot, BoingBoing and a number of loony New World Order conspiracist sites.
Even Second Life, much mocked in some quarters for the perception gap between its popularity with media and big businesses and in the real world, was far and away a bigger source of traffic for us.
There could be a number of reasons for this: firstly, maybe my numbers don't match those of other people. But it could be that Techmeme's important to a small number of technology industry influencers, but doesn't really extend its reach beyond that. Perhaps a huge number of its readers are on RSS and can't be bothered to click the links (it's also worth noting that Techmeme's RSS feed directs you not to the story you're interested in reading, but back to Techmeme's pages). Or perhaps it's still just a product that's still in the early stages of growth.
But for the people who jostle for position on the site's top 100, what's the use of being part of an aggregator that aggregates but doesn't send readers your way?
Update: Dave Winer's emailed to say I've misquoted him. That wasn't the intention: it was more that he'd inadvertently highlighted traffic issues in his post. I've made an amendment to make this clear.
