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While re-evaluating the ranking scheme for Pinoy Top Blogs, I realized that some prevalent factors on blog traffic statistics are not a guaranteed measure to determine who should be on top and who’s not.

Two of the better metrics used here are the Unique Hits and the Total Hits. Unique Hits refer to an inbound traffic of a unique IP (supplemented by cookie tracking) to a specific blog. Total Hits refer to the cummulative number of page requests for the entire blog.

Many would argue that Total Hits can be easily rigged as the individual or group may be the only ones contributing to the traffic artificially. This is usually done by regular refresh of the pages or using a time-bound feature of certain browsers to automate the page reloads. However, using a cookie that only expires after 24 hours can prevent this from happening (unless of course they manually delete the cookie every page load or completely blocked by the browser altogether).

Using Unique Hits holds much promise in the sense that it only counts the unique IPs in the traffic. However, this method can inadvertently exclude a lot of legitimate stats like corporate/university networks which only uses one single public IP. Likewise, those with dynamic IPs gain an edge in contributing to the stats, an issue raised here. On the same thought, unique hits coming from search engines are one time visitors and does not necessarily (or significantly) contribute to the overall standing of a blog in the rankings.

A lot of toher questions have been raised as well. “Does a blog with 10 visitors contributing 100 pageviews (10 repeat visits) a more popular blog than a blog with 100 visitors contributing 100 pageviews (no repeat visits)?

With these considerations in mind, I am tempted to formulate a hybrid computation to equalize traffic stats. As to how the formula would look like, I still have to figure it out.

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Sounds incredulous but it’s very well true. Darren of ProBlogger.net just got his biggest monthly cheque from Google at the amount of $14,436.45. That’s more than Php800,000 at the current peso exchange rate. And he got all that just for the month of May.

This got everybody talking about him even before he got Slashdotted a couple of days ago.

Even if you only get 10% of that a month around here, it’s still big bucks. And all I get is a measly hundred bucks each month. Mr. ProBlogger has already even bought a house from his previous earnings.

Darren’s blogs (all 20 of them) are a living proof that one can really make it full-time just blogging. Well, he spends 8 to 12 hours a day reading and writing blogs but, he’s getting hits even while flying to some conference or seminar. And he’s been at it for years now.

In the local scene, I only know of a handful (2 or 3 other people) Pinoy bloggers who are able to get past the $100-barrier each month. There are still others though who run online directories, link farms and content factories (re-publishing lifted text) to earn the clicks.