So did everyone really know to go straight to Endgadget or did they come up near the top when people searched iPhone on Google, etc?

I don’t know if you can look at page views and say that they had more traffic. They were doing live blogging and so a lot of those page views were probably the same people. I know I refreshed 20 or 30 times at least during the Jobs keynote. I am sure they did get a spike in uniques (I, for example, don’t usually visit engadget more than once per week) … but that’s the number you should be looking at. Also, I don’t think anyone claimed mainstream audiences weren’t paying attention to MacWorld–I think every major network evening newscast had a story on the iPhone that night.

Tyler: Speaking strictly from my experience, I went to engadget first because it’s one of the few gadget blogs I know and I figured they’d have people blogging from both CES and MacWorld.

I hit up engadget for macworld, they are one of the few sites that can stand the clobbering. I probably hit refresh 100 times. 10 million page views is really impressive though!

Looking at the graph further down on this page

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/lee.....leads.html

It appears that there are other phenominal blogs doing better than Engadget.

But in terms of QUALITY of visitors, you could NOT get much better than this blog and Radar-Oreilly and Battellemedia - a select, well rounded, educated readership that any Advertiser would crave.

Read some the comments on some of the other popular blogs (duh).

If you ask women who spend a lot of time talking about and shopping for jewelries why they waste so much time on such frivolous activities, you might get answers like, “It’s inexplicable, but jeweleries complete me.”

I’ll bet the great majority of those who clicked over to Engadget 10 million times on iPhone day are guys, and if you ask them why they drooled so embarrassingly, they’d probably answer, “It’s inexplicable, but gadgets like iPhone complete me.”

In other words, iPhone = male bling.

Steve Jobs gets the rule of male vanity — “dudes got to have it”.

Mike

You’re right blogging is simply changing the way we get the news. This new Generation-i is going after information instantly. That’s why I call them Gen-i everything is Internet, instant, information a bit isolated, and definitely alll about the immediate. The iPhone will be adopted in greater numbers than the iPod. It simply has greater functionality. And it’s usability is obvious. Blogs like engadget are definitely a danger to mainstream media. They don’t know how to handle it. Murdoch does, obviously you simply buy it and make it part of the flock. Smart man, he gets it. The question is the validity but that will prove out over time.

it’s probably a slashdot effect …

ummm, why are you pointing out something good about a competitor to one of your sites?

@anon: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pointing out something good on one of your competitor’s sites.

I’ve been blogging for 2 years now and noticed that in some niches big blogs tend to bite each other’s authorities and won’t mention the other big guys in any situation (see: Engadget & Gizmodo).

In the entertainment niche, the big guys share the authority, they exchange links on a weekly basis and acknowledge each other, this way they both earn more traffic and money.

If the tech-gadgets niche were as cooperative as the entertainment one, both Gizmodo, Engadget and all the big (and possibly) the smaller guys will have more traffic, revenue and the “market share” wouldn’t necessarily change.

Allen.H

Gizmodo croaked about thirty minutes into the keynote speech, so that was that. I was using both of them, plus a couple of other more moment-to-moment sources, but I eventually just closed the Gizmodo window.

The huge, clear photos were another thing that was attractive about the Engadget coverage.

And the number of staff that they had at Comdex: amazing. See today’s post with the staff photograph (of course, they may have called over some hotel staff ringers, I suppose). Was there any mainstream media with so many reporters?

I’m surprised Engadget mentioned it. They usually don’t talk about stuff thats going to be sold in the US.

Like others I breathlessly waited news from Macworld. The Engadget numbers reflect the seismic shift is how people get the news. The NY Times great columnist David Pogue was relatively slow getting the info out, and more importantly, The Times didn’t really push readers to his blog. (I would have promised updates throughout the day, so readers knew to check back).
The blogging world is crushing old media for this type of event. There still is a lot on the table. I stilll haven’t found a killer, constantly updated sports blog, for example.

I wrote about this on my blog, saying that “the coverage of Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote was a great demonstration of the social web in action, and the benefits it can bring to news coverage. We had multiple bloggers live-blogging from the event, AJAX-powered text and photo feeds from sites like Macrumors, and the self-appointed editors of Digg (i.e. users) continuously ensured that breaking news from the Moscone Center hit Digg’s front-page within minutes.”

But I also noted:

“…there is a down-side to such rapid-fire reporting — it doesn’t provide sufficient time for Steve Jobs’ famous Reality Distortion Field (RDF) to wear off.”

Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field and the social web

Mike - what were the unique visitors during that day on engadget. Josh #2 is dead on. Pageviews are a dead model for so many reasons, this one is a perfect one. Did they have a new mass number of uniques, oh I am sure they did. But I am not sure I can just agree with this statement quite yet, “With massive numbers of readers flocking to blogs when big news is announced, it’s hard to say that mainstream audiences aren’t paying attention.” Without knowing the reader demographics of engadget, it’s hard to say if the traffic was mainstream or was their normal traffic with a good bump times the refreshes.

10 million pageviews is not really that many if users like Josh were refreshing 30+ times, which I am guessing might be closer to 50-75. (disclaimer: this is still freakin awesome)

I do agree with this statement, “Pictures and video were available real time as well. By the time television and newspapers got to the story, the really interested readers were already on to the next thing.” Same thing could be said for your coverage of the YouTube deal few months ago.

And yes, Engadget did a great job of coverage, hats off to them.

Well looks like National Events are having Capital Market like affect on the fortunes of blogs with earnings spiking and augmenting correspondingly.

http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com

I read the live-blogging on Engadget and kept refreshing the page to read the updates. Did they count the refreshes?

And did you compare Engadget traffic numbers with the “big news providers”? And the CPM?

Good news for itself, but I am not sure if other things were considered. For example, I bet a lot of Engadget readers went to NYT to read a more in-depth view on the iPhone, since they actually used the product and interviewed Steve Jobs after the keynote. More meat.

I am surprised that Engadget has so many visits. I really didn’t like there page all that well. I have visited in the past, but I like your CruchGear page way better.

” © 2006 Michael Arrington ”
maybe its time to update this

pageviews or more unique thats a hell of a lot of traffic!…period in one day.

I wonder how many hits flickr and google image search received during the same day for iphone queries.

@anon - Because of the off chance the may link back. It’s worth a shot.

I would also be interested in knowing the increase in uniques that day. I am sure it is far less than 10 times.

Heck, Ive never even felt the urge to visit engadget until this article.

Macrumorslive.com had the best live coverage of the event with a little app that refreshed. Gizmodo got crushed and engadget stayed up despite the millions of pageviews.

I was one of those hitting engadget at least 100 visits that day…and i know a few others in the office who were as well… maybe it was simply 100,000 geeks with 100 pageviews each each :). It is really great traffic. I was one of those that came home at the end of the day and wasn’t so interested to see on tv.

#24 Jeremy — spot on.

Big difference btw 100,000 geeks who already read engadget with 100 pageviews each and…

1 million new unique mainstream visitors with 10 views each.

biiiiiiiiiiiiiiig difference.

That site has too many posts a day that I can’t even finish reading it everyday.

But to get a 10 million page views in one day and how they managed to handle such a great deal of requests is phenomenal.

michael…

have to disagree with part of your thesis regarding blogs….

“…By the time television and newspapers got to the story, the really interested readers were already on to the next thing…”

not all ‘really interested readers’ need/care to have up to the second/minute latest news on a given speech/item. in fact, some have jobs, and find that the ability to get the news in a batch format for consumption at their discretion is more than sufficient.

i tend to start to laugh when people involved with something start to say/imply that the ‘hip’ people do what we do, and if you don’t do what we do, then you ‘don’t get it’!!

blogs, are simply another in a long line of ‘things’ that ultimately become tools, or a means of providing information/content. the major difference with blogs, is that we as a community/society appear to have started drinking the koolaid to think that there is something new/different with a ‘blog’…

any fool can get a ‘blog’, and in fact, most appear to be created/written by people that you wouldn’t really pay a dime to see/hear. don’t get me wrong, i think that there are some writers/articles that are quite good, just as i think there are some writers/articles in ‘time’ that haven’t really done their homework…

i’m just not buying into what i perceive to be the hype about ‘blogs’…

your mileage might vary…

peace

must be nice to have the aol firehose of traffic pointed at you. frankly, they should have done better than 10mm

Does anyone know the numbers of how much money is engadget making a month?

We’d have to agree with Josh–he’s comment #2. And in no way do we want to discount the awesome number of page hits, what website wouldn’t want 1 million page his a day. It seems that yes there was a lot of refreshing going on. Last month at Combat Films and Research our website had 330,000 page hits and our visitors were 15,000. This has been fairly consistan for us the last few months as we have been streaming CFR-TV.

So looking at the numbers each of our visitors looks at 22 different pages ±. if we apply Josh’s rule of refreshing that would put their uniques somewhere around 45,500. Still an awesome number. We’d love to invite everyone to start visiting CFR and pulling in those kinds of numbers.

The long and short of it, congrats engadget, that’s a big accomplishment.

Combat Films

Weblogs, Inc. itself had a big day. TUAW, AutoBlog and a few others all saw record days.

In regards to handling all the requests (comment #26), God bless Blogsmith

The power of marketing…even if this device does not deliver…share curiosity and hype will allow Apple to accomplish its goal…..

10 million? Hmm. Isn’t that the sales target that Steve announced for 2008? (yeah, I know. 10 million views not 10 million unique visitors, but still… Engadget isn’t the only place that people were visiting to follow this story.)

I think that this is one more evidence of why the page view metric is not meaningful anymore. Most people who followed the keynote pressed reload 30-100 times to try to get a semi-real time experience of the keynote. I think that Engadget does a create work but I do not believe that they are in a different category and I think that there is still room for improvement: decision guides. It is create to get a flow of products but the average consumer wants more: how do all these products compare? which one should I buy? etc..

I am frankly shocked how this made it to the Digg home page. Typical way to get some press about Crunchgear by giving cred to another one.

But more importantly, page views are almost worthless. It is interesting to actually read your posts.

Posts which are startup related are good because you copy what they send you plus add a little bit.

Posts which you try to use your opinion are crap clearly showing your limited knowledge of the business to which you supposedly report.

Your traffic comes from the kiddies who want to yank your chain on Digg.

Generation i - information instantly, I like that one! Trademark it immediately

this is very interesting because it’s a whole new world and as I see it can really open up new and different channels for smaller companies to get their product out there. Not everyone can command this jesus-quality factor of the steve jobs mystique but we’re not bound to only paying pre-MySpace Murdoch’s and his vast minions tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars on traditional advertising.

to me at least, this is very exciting. When I read the daily paper it’s almost boring because I’ve already read most of the articles online (so I just read the comics)

i doubt engadget is going to pick up any new visitors from that HUGE spike in traffic. Like an earlier poster pointed out, it was probabaly a large # of TechCrunch readers who were refreshing the page 40-75 times a day, lord knows they were all sitting in front of their computer ALL day. Sure it was a nice jump in traffic but I wouldn’t get too fired up over it. They aren’t mainstream.

“By the time television and newspapers got to the story, the really interested readers were already on to the next thing.”

So true … traditional news outlets’ glacial creep into web journalism is appalling. The web staff in TV newsrooms I’ve worked in are the ugly stepchildren - the “real” journalists snicker at them, and management sees them as data entry clerks, merely transcribing the broadcast stories for the web.

Ignorance of the instantaneousness of live blogged news is especially puzzling, considering TV news’ obsession with “Live Breaking News!” Wise news managers will learn from events like iPhone Day and other heavily blogged events/tragedies, etc. It’s time they abandon their tired, old work flow models that haven’t evolved much since Murrow and his boys dazzled on the Dumont.

Our apple blog did show 4x the impressions.

Not meant to take anything away from Engadget, but the unique visitor to pageview ratio must have been very high that day

All I got to say is that engadget has great content!

Boing Boing linked engadget that day …

Wow, I don’t think you could’ve compressed that Engadget logo any more.

Hmmm I wonder if Arrington has stock in AT&T or Apple… In the article about Cell Swapper http://www.techcrunch.com/2007.....ike-magic/
gives his full endorsement behind this product and leaving Verizon for Cingular.

This article is more about the hype of the iPhone… I think the increase of page views had to do with CES more than iPhone… I am sure that most gadget/electronic news sites had a surge in traffic this past week.

Shows how powerful the apple brand is.

Hey Michael.
Brian from Gizmodo here. Just to let you know, Gizmodo had about 3.8 million clicks that day, so your estimate of 5x the traffic is wrong. The numbers are public at nickdenton.org, as everyone knows. And you’re a brilliant man, so I wonder if a conflict of interest is rearing its head here. I know you don’t like those.

Also, our site stayed up the entire time, but our multipost layout was a bit more confusing to some than the single page layout of Engadget. We just can’t have a long, multiphoto post load up that many times without eating shit. (We do not have 50 servers hosted by AOL to keep us above water.) Either way, we messed up, and will have to rethink the format for next time.

Gizmodo does link to Engadget once in awhile, specifically the excellent blogger and gentleman Ryan Block’s work. We talk. It’s cool, man.

And I’m sorry my Boss (Denton) hurts your feelings. But I feel like a disclaimer highlighting the personal differences the two of you have (He thinks you’re important enough to write about; you think he’s evil) at the bottom of this post would only help your post’s authority, incorrect numbers aside. (In case you forgot, again:Real traffic stats are public, at nickdenton.org.)

Also, you forgot to mention that Apple graced the Fair but Fouth-Mouthed Lady Giz with a hands on of the iphone. A blog receiving an exec briefing by Apple is unprecedented in their history. To my knowledge, some international press, the WSJ, NYT, Newsweek, and a few other big mainstream press were the only ones who got the love. I was flattered, and happy to know that Apple considers us relevant.

I’d like to think that despite our slightly smaller numbers (Thanks, we didn’t know Engadget was hovering around a million) we have a good deal of influence. Just like Macs and PCs. This hopefully increase as my tenure extends beyond the 6-month mark.

My feet are shuffling, the hands are just warming up. “Rumble, young man, rumble,” is all I hear from Lock and Nick.

Blogging is just so darn Fun.

Yours,
Brian

I had no idea that the top blog was so far ahead of the it’s near neighbors. This really is a good example of how steep the drop off is in the “long tail” of the internet we keep reading about. It would be neat to start seeing some datasets for stats like this on the statistics site techcrunch reviewed a while ago, I forget the name, maybe someone below can mention it.

http://www.directhealthsearch.com

I watched the Engadget feed. They have a reputation for doing good live feeds, partly because they summarize well what was just said on stage, and partly because they actually understand the terminology. I saw many misunderstandings on other popular sites that day about the products’ capabilities.

But you know, you’d think Engadget would be able to afford a camera that didn’t make a black shirt look brown! The pics were atrocious in their color balance.

(Or perhaps the gadget experts are not so good at fiddling with the controls on their gadgets! Peter Rojas admitted on his podcast that he used to use a paper dayplanner for most of Engadget’s existence.)

The worst thing about the Engadget site is the infantile comments. They must share the same demographic as Digg.

I wrote up a long piece about misconceptions in how well we did (http://www.ryanablock.com/archive/2007/01/just-how-well-did-engadget-do-last-tuesday/) but the jist is: it was more than 10m (w00t!), we jumped by 300-400% in uniques, the Jobsnote only accounted for about 23% of the day’s traffic (and as a side note, AOL referrers accounted for less than 1%).

All I can say whooosh! and wow’s.

DG…
http://www.ditii.com

A lot of companies are realizing the influence that these blogs have in reaching people who are interested in what’s new. General Motors hosted about twenty bloggers from a variety of sites, not just car sites, at the Detroit Auto Show. It was mostly in conjunction with the Volt introduction, and they set up interviews with various GM executives, and also provided a work room with wifi access and refreshments. All of this generated huge traffic for sites and a lot of publicity for GM

Engadget wasn’t the only WIN site that set records this week either. With the confluence of CES, Macworld and the Detroit Auto Show, Engadget, TUAW, AutoBlog and AutoBlogGreen all had record weeks. Autoblog had 1.5 million hits each on Monday and Tuesday without any liveblogging of a keynote, and AutoBlogGreen that was only started 8 months ago managed twenty times our normal weekday traffic on Sunday following the Chevy Volt intro.

As Jason said on his blog, WIN learned from past experience, and made a major effort to beef up infrastructure, to support the expected traffic. That’s what kept the sites live in spite of the onslaught of traffic. I’m not sure how many writers were at the other shows, but AutoBlog and AutoBlogGreen had a team of seven hitting all the press conferences and publishing stories and photos continuously, and the other sites did the same.

I think it is to the blogospheres advantage to cover huge events like the iphone because they get so much more traffic from it. It would be dumb not to cover it.

I mean look at techcrunch!

Endgadget had by far the best live coverage of the keynote for text and images. Thats why I visited and i’m sure a lot of others did too!

Thats nice.. i love iphone

I wonder , were to find boyfriend to my sister? Joke:)
My online friends propose this link to use -TOP10 - As for me, I think life is now!!!